WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S.
economy may be “on the brink of completing the recovery” from the recession triggered
by the coronavirus pandemic, Richmond Federal Reserve President Thomas Barkin
said on Sunday, although risks remain for some workers.
“Vaccines are rolling out, and case
rates and hospitalizations are falling. Excess savings and fiscal stimulus should
help fund pent-up demand from consumers freed by vaccines and warmer weather,”
Barkin said in remarks prepared for delivery on Sunday evening to a Credit
Suisse conference on investment in Asia.
“With this support, the economy has
come most of the way back,” he said, with the recently enacted $1.9 trillion
coronavirus federal relief program fueling a jump in household incomes and
savings that helps offset the still-deep loss of jobs.
“I am hopeful that we are on the
brink of completing the recovery,” Barkin said.
As the health crisis eases, he said
U.S. officials should focus on how to ease the transition back to jobs for
working parents and others displaced by the pandemic, bolster education to
ensure students do not suffer from lost time in the classroom, and take other
steps to prevent “scarring.”
“We should pay special attention to
programs that allow primary caregivers to return to work. This includes support
for child care, elder care and safely reopening schools,” he said.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-barkin/richmond-feds-barkin-u-s-may-be-on-the-brink-of-complete-recovery-idUSKBN2BE04X
China Still Has Room to Provide
Liquidity to Economy: PBOC Chief Bloomberg News 21 March 2021, 03:34 GMT
China still has room to pump liquidity into the economy
while keeping its leverage ratio stable, People’s Bank of China Governor Yi
Gang said in Beijing on Sunday.
China’s macro-leverage ratio, or total debt-to-GDP ratio,
remains at a stable level, Yi said at the China Development Forum in Beijing.
“This will not only provide positive incentives for economic players, but also
help create an environment less likely to spawn financial risks.” he said.
China’s monetary policy is within the normal range with
ample tools to moderate interest rates, according to the governor. The
country’s financial policy framework will also take into account climate change,
while its foreign-exchange reserves will invest more in green bonds and put a
cap on high carbon assets, he said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-21/china-still-has-room-to-provide-liquidity-to-economy-pboc-chief?srnd=premium-europe
But
not all Democrats see boom times ahead. At least not outside of the new
commodity super cycle.
I
would take the other side of Noble Laureate Krugman’s assertion. Of course, there’s a risk of 1970s style
inflation returning.
The
Fedsters and mainstream economists didn’t see inflation coming then and won’t
see it coming next time. They never saw the Great Recession 2008 – 2009 coming
either, nor the Great Stock market crash of 1987.
And
if the Fedsters and mainstream economists ever thought they saw inflation
coming, they wouldn’t say so or take any action to head it off or minimise it.
Summers Sees Worst U.S.
Macroeconomic Policy in 40 Years By Andrew Davis
20 March 2021, 11:42 GMT Updated on 20 March 2021,
14:27 GMT
·
·
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned that the
U.S. is suffering from the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in four
decades, pointing the finger at both Democrats and Republicans for creating
“enormous” risks.
In his latest attack on the recent rush of stimulus,
Summers told David Westin on Bloomberg Television’s “Wall Street Week” that
“what was kindling, is now igniting” given the recovery from Covid will stoke
demand pressure at the same time as fiscal policy has been aggressively eased
and the Federal Reserve has “stuck to its guns” in committing to loose monetary
policy.
“These are the least responsible fiscal macroeconomic
policy we’ve have had for the last 40 years,” Summers said. “It’s fundamentally
driven by intransigence on the Democratic left and intransigence and the
completely irresponsible behavior in the whole of the Republican Party.”
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, a Wall
Street Week contributor, thinks that we are seeing the least responsible
macroeconomic policy in forty years. He disagrees with Paul Krugman's thoughts
on how long it takes inflation expectations to become unanchored. He joins
David Westin on "Bloomberg Wall Street Week."
Summers, a top official in the past two Democratic
administrations, has emerged as one of the leading critics among
Democrat-leaning economists of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic
plan. Summers warned in the interview the U.S. was facing a “pretty dramatic
fiscal-monetary collision.”
He said there is a one-in-three chance that inflation will
accelerate in the coming years and the U.S. could face stagflation. He also saw
the same chance of no inflation because the Fed would hit the brakes hard and push
the economy toward recession. The final possibility is that the Fed and
Treasury will get rapid growth without inflation.
“But there are more risks at this moment that macroeconomic
policy will cause grave risks than I can remember,” said Summers, who is a paid
contributor to Bloomberg.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-20/summers-says-u-s-facing-worst-macroeconomic-policy-in-40-years?srnd=premium-europe
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the
sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the
quantity of money than in output... A steady rate of monetary growth at a
moderate level can provide a framework under which a country can have little
inflation and much growth. It will not produce perfect stability; it will not
produce heaven on earth; but it can make an important contribution to a stable
economic society.
Milton Friedman.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Israeli company claims oral
COVID-19 vaccine on its way An oral vaccine
could potentially allow for people to self vaccinate at home. By MAAYAN
JAFFE-HOFFMAN MARCH 22, 2021 03:56
An
Israeli-American pharmaceutical company is preparing to launch a Phase I
clinical trial for what could become the world’s first oral COVID-19 vaccine .
Oramed
Pharmaceuticals Inc., a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company based on
technology developed by Hadassah-University Medical Center, announced over the
weekend a joint venture with Premas Biotech to develop a novel oral vaccine.
Together they formed the company Oravax Medical Inc. The vaccine is based on
Oramed’s “POD” oral delivery technology and Premas’s vaccine technology.
Oramed’s
technology can be used to orally administer a number of protein-based
therapies, which would otherwise be delivered by injection. Oramed is in the
midst of a Phase III clinical trial through the US Food and Drug Administration
of an oral insulin capsule for type I and type II diabetics.
Premas
has been working on developing a vaccine against the novel coronavirus since
March.
The
companies connected earlier this year, according to Oramed CEO Nadav Kidron,
and quickly realized that they could revolutionize the marketplace.
“An oral COVID-19 vaccine would eliminate several barriers
to rapid, wide-scale distribution, potentially enabling people to take the
vaccine themselves at home,” Kidron said. “While ease of administration is
critical today to accelerate inoculation rates, an oral vaccine could become
even more valuable in the case that a COVID-19 vaccine may be recommended
annually like the standard flu shot.”
The
company completed a pilot animal study and found that the vaccine promoted the
development of Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies and Immunoglobulin A (IgA).
IgA is necessary for longer-term immunity.
The
new Oravax vaccine candidate targets three structural proteins of the
novel coronavirus ,
Kidron explained, as opposed to the single spike protein targeted via the
Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. As such, “this vaccine should be much more
resistant to COVID-19 variants,” Kidron claimed.
In
addition, it is a yeast-based vaccine, making the time and cost of production
much cheaper than its already-approved competitors.
More
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-company-says-oral-covid-19-vaccine-on-its-way-662712
Covid-19: Have a million people
left the UK? By David Brown BBC News 20 March, 2021
The number of people living in the UK could have fallen
significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
One study suggested 1.3 million foreign-born people may
have left the country between 2019 and 2020.
The
report, by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCOE), was
followed by a similar
study from University of Oxford, which suggested that between about 400,000
and 600,000 people had departed.
Younger working-age people in their 20s and 30s had left in
the greatest numbers, according to the Oxford report.
It's thought that many had been working in pubs, cafes and
restaurants when Covid-19 struck.
But researchers behind both projects caution there is huge
uncertainty about their estimates.
So, what is going on?
No-one knows for
certain The gathering of the normal information used to calculate
official population estimates has been seriously disrupted by the pandemic.
The Office for National Statistics normally works out how
many people are leaving the country by talking to a sample of travellers at
places like airports, but stopped doing that in March last year.
There are other useful sources of information like surveys,
which are used to estimate what proportion of the workforce or population comes
from abroad.
But they're not designed to measure migration, and
researchers freely admit that all the sources have big limitations.
So here's what's
likely The total population has "probably" gone down,
says Madeleine Sumption, of University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.
But, she hedges, it's "just about possible" that
it hasn't.
Both her study and the research by ESCOE compared the
period July to September 2019 with the same period in 2020.
---- The lowest estimates of the fall in the
foreign-born population, are about 400,000. And that figure assumes that the UK
population has continued to grow at pre-pandemic rates, despite nearly 60,000
extra deaths by last summer and fewer and fewer foreign-born people showing up
in surveys.
"Given that other estimates,
based on more realistic assumptions are considerably higher, a figure of
500,000 is not unreasonable," says BBC News head of statistics Robert
Cuffe.
A figure of 500,000 is roughly
equivalent to the population of Leeds.
The researchers behind the higher
estimate of 1.3 million say that it's an "illustrative calculation",
and that it's very unlikely that the real number is any higher.
A figure of 1.3 million is larger
than the population of Birmingham.
More
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56435100
Coronavirus: Chinese scientists
find selenium may be a dirty secret behind low infection rates ·
Researchers delve into theory that high
selenium presence in the soil corresponds with higher human immunity
·
But scientists say more research is needed
and warn of dangers associated with excessive intake and taking selenium
without medical advice
Stephen Chen in Beijing Published:
12:30am, 10 Mar, 2021
Enshi, in central China's Hubei province, has the
world’s largest deposit of selenium. Scientists are looking at whether the
correlation of selenium intake and Covid-19 cases has implications for the
pandemic.
Enshi was an enigma during China’s coronavirus outbreak.
The city in western Hubei province
recorded six Covid-19 cases per 100,000 residents. Elsewhere in Hubei,
infection rates were between two and 20 times higher. Scientists had no clue
why the coronavirus spared Enshi until speculation formed last year that the
answer might be in its soil.
A new study by Chinese scientists
published this week supported the theory and found “human selenium levels may
contribute to antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immune effects in Covid-19”.
More
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3124741/coronavirus-chinese-scientists-find-selenium-may-be-dirty-secret?utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_campaign=enlz-gme_scmp_focus_row&utm_content=20210320&tpcc=enlz-scmp_focus_row&MCUID=7c9a8b8fe6&MCCampaignID=949788da58&MCAccountID=7b1e9e7f8075914aba9cff17f&tc=25
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/
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.
Inexpensive tin packs a big punch
for the future of supercapacitors Date: March 17, 2021
Source: Penn State
Summary: A sustainable, powerful micro-supercapacitor
may be on the horizon, thanks to new research. Until now, the high-capacity,
fast-charging energy storage devices have been limited by the composition of
their electrodes -- the connections responsible for managing the flow of
electrons during charging and dispensing energy. Now, researchers have
developed a better material to improve connectivity while maintaining
recyclability and low cost.
A sustainable, powerful
micro-supercapacitor may be on the horizon, thanks to an international
collaboration of researchers from Penn State and the University of Electronic
Science and Technology of China. Until now, the high-capacity, fast-charging
energy storage devices have been limited by the composition of their electrodes
-- the connections responsible for managing the flow of electrons during
charging and dispensing energy. Now, researchers have developed a better
material to improve connectivity while maintaining recyclability and low cost.
They published their results on Feb.
8 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A .
"The supercapacitor is a very
powerful, energy-dense device with a fast-charging rate, in contrast to the
typical battery -- but can we make it more powerful, faster and with a really
high retention cycle?" asked Jia Zhu, corresponding author and doctoral
student conducting research in the laboratory of Huanyu "Larry"
Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in Penn State's Department
of Engineering Science and Mechanics.
Zhu worked under Cheng's mentorship
to explore the connections in a micro-supercapacitor, which they use in their
research on small, wearable sensors to monitor vital signs and more. Cobalt
oxide, an abundant, inexpensive material that has a theoretically high capacity
to quickly transfer energy charges, typically makes up the electrodes. However,
the materials that mix with cobalt oxide to make an electrode can react poorly,
resulting in a much lower energy capacity than theoretically possible.
The researchers ran simulations of
materials from an atomic library to see if adding another material -- also
called doping -- could amplify the desired characteristics of cobalt oxide as
an electrode by providing extra electrons while minimizing, or entirely
removing, the negative effects. They modeled various material species and
levels to see how they would interact with cobalt oxide.
"We screened possible materials
but found many that might work were too expensive or toxic, so we selected
tin," Zhu said. "Tin is widely available at a low cost, and it's not
harmful to the environment."
In the simulations, the researchers
found that by partially substituting some of the cobalt for tin and binding the
material to a commercially available graphene film -- a single-atom thick material
that supports electronic materials without changing their properties -- they
could fabricate what they called a low-cost, easy-to-develop electrode.
Once the simulations were completed,
the team in China conducted experiments to see if the simulation could be
actualized.
"The experimental results
verified a significantly increased conductivity of the cobalt oxide structure
after partial substitution by tin," Zhu said. "The developed device
is expected to have promising practical applications as the next-generation
energy storage device."
Next, Zhu and Cheng plan to use
their own version of graphene film -- a porous foam created by partially
cutting and then breaking the material with lasers -- to fabricate a flexible
capacitor to allow for easy and fast conductivity.
"The supercapacitor is one key
component, but we're also interested in combining with other mechanisms to
serve as both an energy harvester and a sensor," Cheng said. "Our
goal is to put a lot of functions into a simple, self-powered device."
The National Natural Science
Foundation of China supported this work.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210317141614.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
“The political problem of mankind is to
combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual
liberty.”
John
Maynard Keynes.
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