February
15, 2021 12:06 AM
By Leika
Kihara , Tetsushi Kajimoto
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s economy expanded
more than expected in the fourth quarter, extending the recovery from its worst
postwar recession thanks to a rebound in overseas demand that boosted exports
and capital spending.
But the recovery slowed from the
third quarter’s brisk pace and new state of emergency curbs cloud the outlook,
underscoring the challenge policymakers face in preventing the spread of
COVID-19 without choking off a fragile recovery, especially in the battered
consumer sector.
“Conditions are such that Japan will
not be able to avoid negative growth in the first quarter,” said Takumi
Tsunoda, senior economist at Shinkin Central Bank Research.
“There is a high possibility that
there will be a repeating cycle of coronavirus infections spreading and being
contained this year, which means that consumption is not likely to recover at
the expected pace.”
The world’s third-largest economy
grew an annualised 12.7% in October-December, government data showed on Monday,
exceeding a median market forecast for a 9.5% gain.
It was slower than the revised 22.7%
surge in the previous quarter, when the economy got a lift from pent-up demand
after a previous state of emergency was lifted in May.
For the full coronavirus-stricken
year, Japan’s economy contracted 4.8%, the first annual fall since 2009.
But Japan’s October-December
performance was stronger than U.S. growth of 4% and a 2.8% slump in the euro
zone. With two straight quarters of solid growth, Japan’s economy likely
recouped 90% of pandemic-induced losses, analysts say.
---- Japan’s stronger-than-expected GDP data
comes amid signs the pandemic’s hit to other Asian economies toward the end of
last year was not as severe as first feared.
Figures released on Monday showed
Thailand’s GDP shrank less than expected in the fourth quarter while the
contraction in Singapore’s economy was smaller than initial estimates.
A global rebound in manufacturing
gave Japan’s exports and capital expenditure a much-needed boost on strong
shipments to a rapidly recovering Chinese economy.
External demand, or exports minus
imports, added 1.0% point to fourth-quarter GDP growth thanks to a 11.1% surge
in exports.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-gdp/japan-extends-economic-recovery-as-exports-capex-shake-off-covid-hit-idUSKBN2AF002
Next, is a Biden comeuppance heading for Wall Street? If
it is and stock mania collapse in the casinos is coming next, does anyone
remember what happened in the 1990s when Japan’s massive stock bubble burst?
It’s taken over 30 years to get back to highs. This time
it’s different, right?
Wall Street regulators signal
tougher approach to industry after GameStop frenzy Tory
Newmyer and Matt Zapotosky , The Washington Post
Feb.
14, 2021 Updated:
Feb. 14, 2021 1:37 p.m.
The Biden administration is sending
a clear signal to Wall Street that the industry's Washington cops are back on
the beat. Regulators and federal prosecutors are probing potential misconduct
in the GameStop trading frenzy, as the Securities and Exchange Commission moves
to restore harsher penalties on wrongdoers.
Attorneys in the Justice
Department's criminal division are conducting a wide-ranging investigation into
possible market manipulation from the trading surrounding GameStop, and
recently issued a subpoena to Robinhood as part of that, a person familiar with
the matter said. The probe, though, appears to be in its early stages.
SEC acting chair Allison Herren Lee
in a radio interview earlier this month said the agency already is
investigating the matter "from a number of different angles, and they're
very significant."
Specifically, she indicated the
agency is looking into whether brokers such as Robinhood complied with
regulations when they limited trading in certain so-called "meme
stocks." And she said the agency is looking for signs of market
manipulation amid the trading mania. A Robinhood spokesman declined to comment.
Beyond the GameStop probe, Lee said
Thursday that the agency is reversing a policy that shielded financial firms
settling charges from further punishment. Under the Trump-era approach, the SEC
bundled settlement agreements with waivers that allowed the targeted companies
to continue raising money in public markets.
Lee in a statement said the new
policy marks a "return to the division's long-standing practice" and
ensures "that the consideration of waivers is forward looking and focused
on protecting investors, the market, and market participants from those who
fail to comply with the law."
More
https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/business/article/Wall-Street-regulators-signal-tougher-approach-to-15950501.php
Finally, as Americans set off to celebrate President’s
Day, Russia’s Siberia comes to visit plains USA. Fuel inflation next?
Historic
Arctic outbreak brings dangerous cold, snow and ice to central and southern
U.S. Winter storm warnings and advisories cover all of Texas,
Oklahoma and Missouri as snow and ice move in Andrew Freedman February 14, 2021
Temperatures about 50 degrees below
average occupy an enormous swath of the central United States, stretching from
the Rockies to the Mississippi Valley and the Midwest. At least 15 states could
see temperatures of minus-10 or colder, while lows near the U.S.-Canada border
flirt with minus-40.
A major
winter storm will hit Texas, Mississippi Valley from Sunday into Monday
More than 50 million people could
see temperatures dip below zero during the next several days as the
record-setting deep freeze envelops the country.
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott
(R) issued a
state disaster declaration
“Extreme impacts” were likely, according to the National
Weather Service. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) declared a weather disaster
emergency for his state, with every county under a winter storm warning. The
cold is expected to be damaging in these areas, with pipe bursts in homes
adding to ice-induced power outages.
Air
mass is coming straight from the North Pole The core of the cold was found
bleeding south over the Plains on Sunday morning. This air originated in
Siberia and crossed the Pole before moving south into North America.
Numerous daily temperature records
are falling during this cold snap, and even some all-time records. For example,
the temperature in Bottineau, N.D., fell to minus-51 degrees Saturday morning,
an all-time record. Bismarck reported a low of minus-28 early Saturday and was
sitting at minus-25 to start Sunday morning.
More
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/14/arctic-outbreak-south-cold-snow/?itid=hp-more-top-stories
U.S. Cold
Blast So Extreme Gas Pipes Are Starting to Freeze Brian K Sullivan February 12, 2021, 8:36 AM EST
The unprecedented Arctic blast that has gripped the U.S.
for much of the week has paralyzed natural gas pipelines, brought deadly ice
storms to Houston and is about to get worse.
Nearly 300 new daily temperature
records could be set, mainly across the Great Plains from Canada to Texas
through Tuesday, said Marc Chenard, a senior branch forecaster at the U.S.
Weather Prediction Center. New York City will be dealing with ice and some snow
showers from Saturday through Tuesday, with highs mostly hovering just above or
below freezing.
As much as 6 inches (15 centimeters)
of snow could fall in Forth Worth, Texas, over the weekend, with temperatures
possibly plunging into the single digits Fahrenheit on Monday. A 130-vehicle pileup
The cold is also weighing on the
state’s sprawling energy infrastructure. Natural gas pipes and processing
plants are starting to shut, disrupting output of the heating fuel.
Furthermore, a series of winter
storms will ride along the leading edge of the cold from the Pacific Northwest
to the East Coast. That could bring 6 to 12 inches of snow across western
Washington and Oregon, including Seattle, while ice and sleet could touch
Houston before coming up the East Coast early next week.
The Electric Reliability Council of
Texas, which oversees the state’s main power grid, warned of record power
demand due to extreme temperatures. The average spot price for electricity in
North Texas was $292.53 a megawatt-hour as of 10 a.m. local time, according to
grid data complied by Bloomberg. That compares with an average of $17.83 so far
this month.Texas facilities limiting
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/weekend-freeze-to-set-records-in-u-s-as-energy-prices-spike?srnd=markets-vp
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
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Vitamin C/zinc ineffective. Vitamin D very effective. So
why aren’t governments promoting vitamin D?
Study: Zinc, vitamin C have no
effect on COVID-19 infection Feb. 12, 2021 / 11:02 AM
Feb. 12 (UPI) -- Zinc and vitamin C supplements may help boost the immune system,
but they offer little, if any, benefit as a treatment for COVID-19 ,
according to a study published Friday by JAMA Network Open .
The study was "terminated" after 10 days of
treatment with either zinc, vitamin C or both because they did not produce
improvement in non-hospitalized patients infected with the coronavirus, the
researchers said.
"High-dose zinc or vitamin C or [both in] combination
do not reduce duration of illness in outpatients affected by COVID-19 as
compared to standard of care," study co-author Dr. Milind Desai told UPI.
As the trial did not reach its "primary
endpoint," which was proof of the beneficial effects of zinc or vitamin C,
[it] was terminated early," said Desai, a professor of cardiovascular
medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
Several studies have explored the benefits of immune
system-boosting supplements in treatmenting COVID-19, either alone or in
combination with drug therapy.
One supplement, vitamin D, is known to be important for
immune health, and research has suggested that low levels may raise COVID-19
infection risk -- and treating infected patients with the vitamin has been
shown to improve odds for survival .
Based on the findings of Desai and his colleagues, however,
the same does not appear to hold true for zinc and vitamin C.
For this study, Cleveland Clinic researchers treated 214
patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection with either 50 milligrams per day of
zinc, 8,000 mg. per day of vitamin C, both or neither for 10 days.
Patients who received usual care without the supplements
achieved a 50% reduction in virus symptoms after about seven days, the data
showed.
While those given vitamin C, zinc or both also saw a 50%
reduction in symptoms after about six days, the researchers said this
difference was not significant enough to continue use of either for COVID-19
treatment.
"Zinc [has been] associated with improved overall
immune health ... in smaller reports," Desai said.
"However, based on our randomized, controlled trial
data, its use to reduce symptom duration in COVID-19 cannot be
recommended."
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2021/02/12/Study-Zinc-vitamin-C-have-no-effect-on-COVID-19-infection/3991613140367/
Calcifediol Treatment and
COVID-19-Related Outcomes [Vit D Ed.] 16 Pages Posted: 22 Jan 2021
Abstract Background: COVID-19 is a major health problem because of
acute respiratory distress syndrome, saturation of intensive care units (ICU)
and mortality.
Logistic regression
of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized
25(OH)D levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had
a reduced risk to require ICU (RR 0.18 [95% CI 0.11;0.29]). Baseline 25(OH)D
levels inversely correlated with the risk of ICU admission (RR 0.53 [95% CI
0.35;0.80]). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-treat analysis, 36
(6.5%) out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared
to 57 patients (15%) out of 379 controls (p=0.001).
Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality for more of
60%. Higher baseline 25(OH)D levels were significantly associated with
decreased mortality (RR 0.40 [95% CI 0.24;0.67]). Age and obesity were also
predictors of mortality.
More
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3771318
CNN Exclusive: WHO Wuhan mission
finds possible signs of wider original outbreak in 2019 By Nick Paton Walsh , CNN Updated
1335 GMT (2135 HKT) February 14, 2021
(CNN) Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of
coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought, and are
urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city
that China has not so far let them examine.
The
lead investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, told CNN in a
wide-ranging interview that the mission had found several signs of the more
wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time there were
over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December. The team also
had a chance to speak to the first patient Chinese officials said had been
infected, an office worker in his 40s, with no travel history of note, reported
infected on December 8.
The
slow emergence of more detailed data gathered on the WHO's long-awaited trip
into China may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins
of the disease that it may have been spreading in China long before its first
official emergence in mid-December.
Embarek,
who has just returned to Switzerland from Wuhan, told CNN: "The virus was
circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding."
The WHO food safety specialist added the team had been
presented by Chinese scientists with 174 cases of coronavirus in and around
Wuhan in December 2019. Of these 100 had been confirmed by laboratory tests, he
said, and another 74 through the clinical diagnosis of the patient's symptoms.
Embarek said it was possible this larger number -- of
likely severe cases that had been noticed by Chinese doctors early on -- meant
the disease could have hit an estimated 1,000-plus people in Wuhan that
December.
"We haven't done any modeling of that
since," he said. "But we know ...in big ballpark figures... out of
the infected population, about 15% end up severe cases, and the vast majority
are mild cases."
Embarek
said the mission -- which comprised 17 WHO scientists and 17 Chinese -- had
broadened the type of virus genetic material they examined from early
coronavirus cases that first December. This allowed them to look at partial
genetic samples, rather than just complete ones, he said. As a result, they
were able to gather for the first time 13 different genetic sequences of the
SARS-COV-2 virus from December 2019. The sequences, if examined with wider
patient data in China across 2019, could provide valuable clues about the
geography and timing of the outbreak before December.
---- Changes in a
virus's genetic makeup are common and normally harmless, occurring over time as
the disease moves between and reproduces among people or animals. Embarek
declined to draw conclusions about what the 13 strains could have meant for the
disease's history before December.
But the discovery of so many different possible
variants of the virus could suggest it had been circulating for longer than
just that month, as some virologists have previously suggested. This genetic
material is likely the first physical evidence to emerge internationally to
bolster such a theory.
Prof. Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of
Sydney, in Australia, said: "As there was already genetic diversity in
SARS-CoV-2 sequences sampled from Wuhan in December 2019, it is likely that the
virus was circulating for a while longer than that month alone."
Holmes, who has studied the virus' emergence at
length, said these 13 sequences might indicate the virus spread for some time
undetected before the December outbreak in Wuhan. "These data fit with
other analyses that the virus emerged in the human population earlier than
December 2019 and that there was a period of cryptic transmission before it was
first detected in the Huanan market."
More
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/14/health/who-mission-china-intl/index.html
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on Sme.sk and Korzar.sk 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.
Wafer-scale
production of graphene-based photonic devices Date: February 11, 2021
Source: Graphene Flagship
Summary: Researchers have devised a wafer-scale
fabrication method that paves the way to the next generation of telecom and
datacom devices.
Our world needs reliable
telecommunications more than ever before. However, classic devices have
limitations in terms of size and cost and, especially, power consumption --
which is directly related to greenhouse emissions. Graphene could change this
and transform the future of broadband. Now, Graphene Flagship researchers have
devised a wafer-scale fabrication technology that, thanks to predetermined
graphene single-crystal templates, allows for integration into silicon wafers,
enabling automation and paving the way to large scale production.
This work, published in the journal ACS
Nano , is a great example of a collaboration fostered by the Graphene
Flagship ecosystem. It counted on the participation of several Graphene
Flagship partner institutions like CNIT and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
(IIT), in Italy, the Cambridge Graphene Centre at the University of Cambridge,
UK, and Graphene Flagship Associated Member and spin-off CamGraphIC.
Furthermore, Graphene Flagship-linked third party INPHOTEC and researchers at
the Tecip Institute in Italy provided the graphene photonics integrated
circuits fabrication. Through the Wafer-scale Integration Work Package and
Spearhead Projects such as Metrograph, the Graphene Flagship fosters
collaboration between academia and leading industries to develop
high-technology readiness level prototypes and products, until they can reach
market exploitation.
The new fabrication technique is
enabled by the adoption of single-crystal graphene arrays. "Traditionally,
when aiming at wafer-scale integration, one grows a wafer-sized layer of
graphene and then transfer it onto silicon," explains Camilla Coletti,
coordinator of IIT's Graphene Labs, who co-led the study. "Transferring an
atom-thick layer of graphene over wafers while maintaining its integrity and
quality is challenging" she adds. "The crystal seeding, growth and
transfer technique adopted in this work ensures wafer-scale high-mobility
graphene exactly where is needed: a great advantage for the scalable fabrication
of photonic devices like modulators," continues Coletti.
It is estimated that, by 2023, the
world will see over 28 billion connected devices, most of which will require
5G. These challenging requirements will demand new technologies. "Silicon
and germanium alone have limitations; however, graphene provides many
advantages," says Marco Romagnoli from Graphene Flagship partner CNIT,
linked third party INPHOTEC, and associated member CamGraphiC, who co-led the
study. "This methodology allows us to obtain over 12,000 graphene crystals
in one wafer, matching the exact configuration and disposition we need for
graphene-enabled photonic devices," he adds. Furthermore, the process is
compatible with existing automated fabrication systems, which will accelerate
its industrial uptake and implementation.
More
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210211113851.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
John
Bull Goes Decimal.
"The old money in fact linked right the way back
to ancient times," said Catherine Eagleton, curator of modern money at the
British Museum.
"So it's the pound of silver divided into 240
pence. It was the historic way the Romans used their money and divided up the
[librum, solidus and] denarius which was where the d in L.s.d. (or £sd) for
pounds, shillings and pence comes from."
Quick decision
But remarkably it took the government only seconds to
decide to get rid of the currency that had served Britain for thousands of
years.
It happened one day when the then Chancellor of the
Exchequer Jim Callaghan popped next door to see Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
The economist Peter Jay, who was also Mr Callaghan's
son-in-law, recalled: "They talked for about 20 seconds and Wilson said
'well why not' and that is how the decision was made... in a few seconds a
century and half of argument about decimalisation came to an end."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12346083
Now we’ve left Europe, bring back/retain tons, hundredweight, stones,
pounds and ounces. But why stop there. Bring back/retain inches, feet, yards, chains,
furlongs, miles. Perch, rood, acre. Gills, pints, quarts and gallons. More
accurate Fahrenheit not centigrade.
It’ll drive Brussels mad trying to comply.
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