NFT Tulips. March 15. Vaccine Woes.

 Baltic Dry Index. 1960 -10 Brent Crude 69.68

Spot Gold 1729

Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000

Deaths 53,100

Coronavirus Cases 15/03/21 World 120,417,285

Deaths 2,665,249

15 March, 44 BC. Julius Caesar stabbed to death by Senators in Rome.

Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator, was assassinated by a group of senators on the Ides of March (15 March) of 44 BC during a meeting of the Senate at the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. The senators stabbed Caesar 23 times. The senators claimed to be acting over fears that Caesar's unprecedented concentration of power during his dictatorship was undermining the Roman Republic, and presented the deed as an act of tyrannicide. At least 60 senators were party to the conspiracy, led by Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius and Decimus Brutus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar

In the US stock casinos this week, it’s all about the arrival of the $1,400 stimulus cheques, watching the US 10 year note (bond) yield, waiting on the message sent out this week by Chairman Powell of the US Federal Reserve, and hoping he’s right about no inflation coming from all the trillions of new dollars.

This time it’s different, right?

One way or another we will know by this time next year, if not sooner.

World stocks inch up on increasing bets on faster economic recovery

March 15, 2021  12:52 AM  By Hideyuki Sano

TOKYO (Reuters) - Global stock prices inched higher while U.S. bond yields hovered near a 13-month peak on Monday as investors bet U.S. economic growth will accelerate after the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill President Joe Biden signed into law last week.

A rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States and some other countries stoked a bullish mood on risk assets even as investors become wary of key central bank policy meets later in the week, including the U.S. Federal Reserve’s.

“The U.S. is now vaccinating more three million people a day, with President Biden now saying all adults will be able to get a shot by May 1. It could soon achieve a herd immunity and an economic normalisation,” said Norihiro Fujito, chief investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.

U.S. S&P500 futures rose 0.2% in early Asian trade, trading just below a record high level touched last week, while Japan’s Nikkei ticked up 0.3%.

Mainland Chinese shares buckled the trend to trade lower despite data showing a quickening in industrial output and a rise in retail sales.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.2%, with Hong Kong leading the gains.

“Most market participants and policy-makers have been surprised by the speed of the recovery. On our estimates, the U.S. economy will reach pre-COVID-19 output levels by the current quarter,” said Chetan Ahya, global head of economics at Morgan Stanley in New York, in a note.

“Fiscal policy is doing much more than fill the output hole. Transfers to households have already exceeded the income lost in the recession. As reopening gathers pace, the labour market is poised for a sharp rebound.”

---- Some investors speculate part of $1,400 direct payments to households could find its way to stock markets, as seemed to be the case with similar direct payments made last year for coronavirus relief.

Investors also suspect the $1.9 trillion package, which amounts to more than 8% of the country’s GDP, could stoke inflation - to the detriment of bonds, especially when their yields are so low.

Rising inflation expectations could prompt the Federal Reserve to signal it will start raising rates sooner when it announces its latest economic projections at the end of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Wednesday.

“Following the fiscal stimulus packages it is inevitable that Fed GDP forecasts will be revised up, and some FOMC members might think rates will have to move higher sooner than they anticipated last December,” wrote economists at ANZ.

More

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets/world-stocks-inch-up-on-increasing-bets-on-faster-economic-recovery-idUSKBN2B701T

Investor questions for the Fed: rebound, inflation and yields

March 15, 2021  5:08 AM  By Karen Brettell, Kate Duguid

(Reuters) - A surge in bond yields, fears about rising inflation and a jump-forward in interest rate expectations will be top of mind for investors at this week’s Federal Reserve policy meeting.

The policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) led by Chair Jerome Powell convenes on March 16-17, with a policy statement and fresh economic projections due to be released at the end of the meeting.

Investors will be looking for signs of whether the U.S. central bank’s outlook for the economy has changed due to the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination program and other developments.

Here are some questions investors may have:

How worried is the Fed about inflation?

The recent passage of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package has some investors worried that America’s expansionary fiscal policy will stoke inflation.

Though recent inflation data showed that core consumer prices haven’t moved significantly in recent months, inflation expectations have risen. The five-year, five-year forward breakeven inflation rate, which tracks the expected rate of inflation over five years in five years’ time, was recently at 2.1%, above the Fed’s target rate of 2%.

But a new framework adopted by the central bank last year means it will allow inflation to rise above its target for a period in order for inflation to average 2% over time. And many economists, including Powell, do not expect the strength in inflation will persist beyond the so-called base effects.

How worried is the Fed about the rise in bond yields?

Investors still hoping for action from the Fed to cap rising yields on longer-dated Treasury bonds may be disappointed. Following the rise in yields to their highest since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, investors and analysts have raised the possibility the Fed could purchase more longer-dated debt to bolster prices.

But while Powell has said he is watching recent Treasury market volatility, he brushed off concerns that the move up in yields might spell trouble for the Fed.

More

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-markets/investor-questions-for-the-fed-rebound-inflation-and-yields-idUSKBN2B70DI

Finally, another central bankster, Great Nixonian Error, fiat money fuelled, scam. By flooding the world with unlimited fiat money, people only know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Below, more sign of an impending currency crisis. Something about fools and money comes to mind.

What are NFTs and why are some worth millions?

Published 13 March, 2021

A digital-only artwork has sold at Christie's auction house for an eye-watering $69m (£50m) - but the winning bidder will not receive a sculpture, painting or even a print.

Instead, they get a unique digital token known as an NFT.

Where Bitcoin was hailed as the digital answer to currency, NFTs are now being touted as the digital answer to collectables.

But there are plenty of sceptics who think it is all a bubble that is going to burst.

What is an NFT?

NFT stands for non-fungible token.

In economics, a fungible asset is something with units that can be readily interchanged - like money.

With money, you can swap a £10 note for two £5 notes and it will have the same value.

However, if something is non-fungible, this is impossible - it means it has unique properties so it cannot be interchanged with something else.

It could be a house, or a painting such as the Mona Lisa, which is one of a kind. You can take a photo of the painting or buy a print but there will only ever be the one original painting.

NFTs are "one-of-a-kind" assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but they have no tangible form of their own.

The digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.

How do NFTs work?

Traditional works of art such as paintings are valuable because they are one of a kind.

But digital files can be easily and endlessly duplicated.

With NFTs, artwork can be "tokenised" to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold.

media captionWill digital-only trading cards replace physical ones?

As with crypto-currency, a record of who owns what is stored on a shared ledger known as the blockchain.

The records cannot be forged because the ledger is maintained by thousands of computers around the world.

NFTs can also contain smart contracts that may give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.

What's stopping people copying the digital art?

Nothing. Millions of people have seen Beeple's art that sold for $69m and the image has been copied and shared countless times.

In many cases, the artist even retains the copyright ownership of their work, so they can continue to produce and sell copies.

But the buyer of the NFT owns a "token" that proves they own the "original" work.

Some people compare it to buying an autographed print.

People are paying millions of dollars for tokens?

Yes. It's as wild as it sounds.

How much are NFTs worth?

In theory, anybody can tokenise their work to sell as an NFT but interest has been fuelled by recent headlines of multi-million-dollar sales.

On 19 February, an animated Gif of Nyan Cat - a 2011 meme of a flying pop-tart cat - sold for more than $500,000.

A few weeks later, musician Grimes sold some of her digital art for more than $6m.

It is not just art that is tokenised and sold. Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey has promoted an NFT of the first-ever tweet, with bids hitting $2.5m.

Christie's sale of an NFT by digital artist Beeple for $69m (£50m) set a new record for digital art.

But as with crypto-currencies, there are concerns about the environmental impact of maintaining the blockchain.

Is this just a bubble?

A day before his record-breaking auction, Beeple - whose real name is Mike Winkelmann - told the BBC: "I actually do think there will be a bubble, to be quite honest.

"And I think we could be in that bubble right now."

Many are even more sceptical.

David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain, said he saw NFTs as buying "official collectables", similar to trading cards.

"There are some artists absolutely making bank on this stuff... it's just that you probably won't," he warned.

The people actually selling the NFTs are "crypto-grifters", he said.

"The same guys who've always been at it, trying to come up with a new form of worthless magic bean that they can sell for money."

Former Christie's auctioneer Charles Allsopp said the concept of buying NFTs made "no sense".

"The idea of buying something which isn't there is just strange," he told the BBC.

"I think people who invest in it are slight mugs, but I hope they don't lose their money."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56371912

From Crypto Art to Trading Cards, Investment Manias Abound

Each market frenzy seems crazier than the last. But all have the same roots.

March 13, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/technology/crypto-art-NFTs-trading-cards-investment-manias.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

There can be few fields of human endeavor 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.

Astra Vaccine Woes Grow as Regulators Try to Ease Clot Fears

By Suzi Ring and Michelle Fay Cortez

14 March 2021, 00:00 GMT Updated on 15 March 2021, 05:30 GMT

Shot once seen as frontrunner now faces halts globall

Company says no evidence vaccine increases blood-clot risk

AstraZeneca Plc’s vaccine for Covid-19, once expected to be a mainstay of protection for much of the world, remains shrouded in controversy as more countries limit its use even as scientists warn of the need for governments to tread carefully.

The Netherlands joined a growing list of about a dozen places, including northern Italy and Ireland, moving to suspend the shot over concerns about possible side effects from two batches. While regulators from Europe to Asia said there was no indication of any direct link with the vaccine, reports of serious blood clotting after inoculation triggered a spate of suspensions stretching as far as Thailand.

The safety scare emerged against a backdrop of supply woes, and continue a drumbeat of bad news that started with questions about its initial trials and now extends to its potential faltering efficacy against a novel variant. Even as some countries suspend its use, others like the U.S. are moving to protect their own stockpiles, blocking efforts to redistribute the shot’s supply to places with urgent needs.

What’s the Best Covid Vaccine? Why It’s Not So Simple

Astra has defended the vaccine, saying in a Sunday statement that more than 17 million doses have been administered in Europe and U.K., with no evidence that the shot increased the risk of blood clots. As of March 8, there have been 15 reports of clots in the legs, called deep vein thrombosis, and 22 cases where they reached the lungs, known as pulmonary embolism.

Politicians are acting with an abundance of caution, but run the risk of hurting global efforts to vaccinate, said Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccine safety expert at the University of Auckland and a former World Health Organization adviser on vaccine safety.

“You have to be very careful because it’s also sending a message that there could be something very wrong with the vaccine when in fact, it’s very unlikely that there is,” she said. “We’re doing massive mass vaccination campaigns and people get sick all the time. We can’t panic every time it happens. But we also need to take all precaution. And it’s a hard balance.”

The number of events are lower than what would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of that size, AstraZeneca’s Chief Medical Officer Ann Taylor said. In studies, participants getting the vaccine had fewer clots than those given placebo.

On Monday, Thailand said it would resume its planned rollout of the shot this week, four days after suspending it, as a medical panel had decided that the vaccine did not lead to clots. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha and some of his cabinet members will be receiving it on Tuesday.

European Crisis

The drama keeps Astra at the center of a political storm in Europe, weeks after manufacturing issues first put the two sides into conflict. Meanwhile, the EU is falling further behind the U.K. and the U.S. in vaccinations, creating a political crisis for the bloc’s leaders.

In addition to low yields producing less vaccine than planned, one plant in the Netherlands is still awaiting regulatory approval to deploy doses. The site, owned by the manufacturer Halix, is making the vaccine drug substance for Astra and forms part of both the EU and U.K. supply chains. Halix didn’t respond to a request for comment outside of normal business hours.

But the various issues mean Astra will only be able to deliver about 100 million doses to the EU in the first half of the year, it said Friday, about a third of the number originally planned. Thirty million doses are due to be delivered by the end of this quarter, with the rest coming in the next three months.

More

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-14/astrazeneca-s-eu-vaccine-disaster-deepens-on-clots-nationalism?srnd=premium-europe

German COVID cases could revisit December peak in April

by Reuters  Saturday, 13 March 2021 14:19 GMT

BERLIN, March 13 (Reuters) - German health experts warned on Saturday against any further easing of coronavirus lockdown measures as the number of cases jumped again, raising the possibility that infections could again reach peaks seen around Christmas by mid-April.

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases predicted that the number of daily reported cases could exceed 30,000 in the 14th week of the year starting April 12.

"An extrapolation of the trends shows that case numbers can be expected above the Christmas level from week 14 onwards," the RKI said in its current situation report.

On Saturday, the number of COVID-19 cases rose by 12,674 and the death toll was up 239, with the number of cases per 100,000 over seven days jumping to 76.1 from 72.4.

Germany's death toll from the virus stands at 73,301, with a reported 2,558,455 infections.

Frustration about the ongoing lockdown and the slow pace of vaccinations has been denting support for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, also under fire over a face mask procurement scandal involving lawmakers from the party.

A small group of protesters braved rain in Berlin on Saturday to demonstrate against the lockdown.

Merkel's Christian Democrats have seen support slip in two states where regional elections on Sunday will be a crucial gauge of popular feeling before a federal election in September.

Merkel and state leaders agreed a phased easing of curbs earlier this month along with an "emergency brake" to let authorities reimpose restrictions if case numbers rise above 100 per 100,000 on three consecutive days.

The RKI report said the rapid spread in Germany of a more infectious virus variant first detected in Britain could mean that the number of cases per 100,000 reaches levels of between 200 and 500 by mid-April.

Leaders are due to meet again on March 22 to discuss whether any further relaxation of the rules is possible.

https://news.trust.org/item/20210313131558-9pe16

 

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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 Covid-19 data tracker (UK)

https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national

Technology Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.

Scientists discover 4 new particles

Posted by EarthSky Voices in Human World | March 14, 2021

On March 3, scientists at CERN in Geneva – which operates the the Large Hadron Collider, largest particle physics laboratory in the world – announced the discovery of 4 brand-new elementary particles.

By Patrick Koppenburg, Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics and Harry Cliff, University of Cambridge

This month is a time to celebrate. On March 3, 2021, CERN announced the discovery of four brand new particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. This means that the LHC has now found a total of 59 new particles, in addition to the Nobel prize-winning Higgs boson, since it started colliding protons – particles that make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons – in 2009. Excitingly, while some of these new particles were expected based on our established theories, some were altogether more surprising.

The LHC’s goal is to explore the structure of matter at the shortest distances and highest energies ever probed in the lab, testing our current best theory of nature: the Standard Model of Particle Physics. And the LHC has delivered the goods: it enabled scientists to discover the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the model. That said, the theory is still far from being fully understood.

One of its most troublesome features is its description of the strong force which holds the atomic nucleus together. The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which are in turn each composed of three tiny particles called quarks (there are six different kinds of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom). If we switched the strong force off for a second, all matter would immediately disintegrate into a soup of loose quarks, a state that existed for a fleeting instant at the beginning of the universe.

Don’t get us wrong: the theory of the strong interaction, pretentiously called
“quantum chromodynamics,” is on very solid footing. It describes how quarks interact through the strong force by exchanging particles called gluons. You can think of gluons as analogs of the more familiar photon, the particle of light and carrier of the electromagnetic force.

However, the way gluons interact with quarks makes the strong force behave very differently from electromagnetism. While the electromagnetic force gets weaker as you pull two charged particles apart, the strong force actually gets stronger as you pull two quarks apart. As a result, quarks are forever locked up inside particles called hadrons – particles made of two or more quarks – which includes protons and neutrons. Unless, of course, you smash them open at incredible speeds, as we are doing at CERN.

To complicate matters further, all the particles in the standard model have antiparticles which are nearly identical to themselves but with the opposite charge (or other quantum property). If you pull a quark out of a proton, the force will eventually be strong enough to create a quark-antiquark pair, with the newly created quark going into the proton. You end up with a proton and a brand new “meson”, a particle made of a quark and an antiquark. This may sound weird but according to quantum mechanics, which rules the universe on the smallest of scales, particles can pop out of empty space.

This has been shown repeatedly by experiments. We have never seen a lone quark. An unpleasant feature of the theory of the strong force is that calculations of what would be a simple process in electromagnetism can end up being impossibly complicated. We therefore cannot (yet) prove theoretically that quarks can’t exist on their own. Worse still, we can’t even calculate which combinations of quarks would be viable in nature and which would not.

More

https://earthsky.org/human-world/cern-lhc-4-new-particles?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=4fa11b6428-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-4fa11b6428-394244537

15 March 493AD The Murder of Usurper King of Italy, Odoacer.

When Illus, master of soldiers of the Eastern Empire, asked for Odoacer's help in 484 in his struggle to depose Zeno, Odoacer invaded Zeno's westernmost provinces. The emperor responded first by inciting the Rugii of present-day Austria to attack Italy. During the winter of 487–488 Odoacer crossed the Danube and defeated the Rugii in their own territory. Zeno also appointed the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great who was menacing the borders of the Eastern Empire, to be king of Italy, turning one troublesome ally against another. Theodoric invaded Italy in 489 and by August 490 had captured almost the entire peninsula, forcing Odoacer to take refuge in Ravenna. The city surrendered on 5 March 493; Theodoric invited Odoacer to a banquet of reconciliation. Instead of forging an alliance, Theodoric killed the unsuspecting king.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoacer