By Jessica Jaganathan
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices
edged higher on Wednesday on the prospects for stronger global economic growth
amid increased COVID-19 vaccinations and a report that crude inventories in the
United States, the world’s biggest fuel consumer, fell.
Brent crude futures for June rose by
34 cents, or 0.5%, to $63.08 a barrel by 0123 GMT while U.S. West Texas
Intermediate crude for May was up 32 cents, or 0.5%, to $59.65.
“Optimism on the global economic outlook
boosted sentiment in the crude oil market,” analysts from ANZ bank wrote in a
note on Wednesday.
Prices were buoyed as data on
Tuesday showed U.S. job openings rose to a two-year high in February while
hiring picked up. This followed earlier data showing U.S. services activity
touching a record high in March and China’s service sector showing the sharpest
increase in sales in three months.
The International Monetary Fund said
on Tuesday unprecedented public spending to fight COVID-19, primarily by the
United States, would push global growth to 6% this year, a rate unseen since
the 1970s.
Optimism on a wider rollout of
vaccines also boosted prices with U.S. President Joe Biden moving up the
COVID-19 vaccine eligibility target for all American adults to April 19.
U.S. crude oil stockpiles fell in
the most recent week, while fuel inventories rose, according to three market
sources, citing American Petroleum Institute (API) figures ahead of government
data on Wednesday.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil/oil-prices-rise-on-stronger-economic-outlook-u-s-stockpile-draw-idUSKBN2BU05P
IMF forecasts stronger recovery
for world economy By Andrew Walker BBC World Service economics
correspondent
6 April, 2021.
The International Monetary Fund is
now forecasting a stronger economic recovery this year and next.
The IMF has upgraded both its UK and
global forecasts compared with what it projected in January.
But the British economy is still
predicted to return to its pre-pandemic level of activity only in late 2022.
The agency also warns that
recoveries are diverging dangerously within and between countries.
The new UK forecast is for growth of
5.3% this year and 5.1% in 2022. Both figures are upgrades, though the latter
is only marginally higher than the January forecast.
The recovery follows last year's
pandemic driven contraction of 9.9% which was the deepest of any of the G7
major developed economies.
---- The new global forecasts are growth of 6% and 4.4%
this year and next. Both are upgrades, a fairly modest one for 2022.
That mainly reflects up-rating to the forecast for
developed economies, especially the United States.
In a blog on the forecasts, the IMF's chief economist Gita
Gopinath says a way out of the health and economic crisis is increasingly
visible. Vaccinations, she writes, are likely to power recoveries in many
countries in 2021.
But she is also concerned about how those recoveries are
diverging.
Countries with slower vaccine rollouts, more limited support
from economic policy, and those more reliant on tourism are likely to do less
well.
The first two of these are particular issues for developing
countries. Many have less access to vaccines, and they also tend to find it
more difficult to finance economic and health policy actions.
Among emerging and developing economies, China has already
returned to pre-pandemic levels of economic activity. But many others in the
group are not expected to do so until well into 2023.
The report says the cumulative losses in income per person
over the period 2020 to 2022 are likely to be 20% for those countries, compared
with a less severe but still large figure of 11% for the developed world.
More
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56650685
In precursor to
inflation news, US hamburger flippers are back in demand. Well, Taco flippers
anyway. The trouble with inflation is it’s very easy to start, but almost
impossible to stop.
Fast food struggles to hire as
demand soars, U.S. economy roars April
6, 2021 1:14 PM
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Taco Bell
wants to hire at least 5,000 employees in one day, it said on Tuesday, and is
adding benefits for some general managers to sweeten the pot as restaurants
struggle to hire enough workers to keep up with a surge in sales amid a broader
U.S. economic recovery.
Taco Bell, part of Yum Brands Inc,
will hold spot interviews on April 21 in parking lots at nearly 2,000 Taco Bell
locations, where some candidates won’t even have to leave their cars to apply.
It has also added four weeks of
annual vacation, eight weeks of paid maternity leave, and four weeks of new
parent and guardian “baby bonding” time for general managers at company-owned
locations.
Taco Bell has used such hiring
events before, but never at so many locations at once. “It is no secret that
the labor market is tight” now, Kelly McCulloch, Taco Bell’s chief people
officer, said in a statement.
“Total nightmare” is the way FAT
Brands Inc CEO Andy Wiederhorn describes the staffing situation for franchisees
of his company’s restaurants, which include Johnny Rockets and Fatburger.
“The most recent stimulus check and
unemployment benefits have been a catalyst for people to stay at home” instead
of looking for work, he said.
Though fast-food companies and some other
restaurant chains did well through the coronavirus pandemic as their customers
turned to drive-thru, carry-out and delivery, they are seeing greater sales now
that the weather is warmer, many limits on dining room capacities are lifted,
and people with stimulus checks are eating out.
A measure of U.S. services industry
activity surged to a record high on Monday amid robust growth in new orders,
the latest indication of a roaring economy boosted by increased vaccinations.
Hiring cannot keep pace. The U.S.
restaurant industry in March was still about 1.2 million employees short from
the same month in 2020, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The gap is hardly limited to
hospitality. High jobless rates have not translated into a flurry of applications
for open positions in manufacturing, either.
On Friday, the Labor Department said
916,000 jobs were created last month, the most since last August, including
53,000 manufacturing positions. That was the highest number of new factory jobs
in six months.
---- Restaurants are competing not just with
each other for employees but with other industries, as some hospitality workers
who were laid off found other kinds of work – construction or real estate, for
instance - and are not coming back, FAT Brands’ Wiederhorn said.
“That waiter or waitress can sell a
car just as well as they can sell a cocktail,” Wiederhorn said.
In Las Vegas, which has about 16
Johnny Rockets and Fatburger locations, employees are working double shifts.
“It’s just hard, it gets old and tiring,” Wiederhorn said. “You can only do it
for so long.”
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fast-food-labor/fast-food-struggles-to-hire-as-demand-soars-u-s-economy-roars-idUSKBN2BT1GB?il=0
In the Swiss Bank
greed, muppet calamity, greed, it turns out, wasn’t good. In fact, it looks
like the very opposite of good which, as I remember, is something called bad in
the technical jargon used in finance.
But it won’t turn out
bad for the tort lawyers, who should make a nice living off of the Swiss bank
greed calamity for the next few years, possibly longer, if too many muppets
decide to sue.
Archegos-Linked Stocks Drop After
Fresh $2 Billion Block Trades By Divya Balji
6 April 2021, 09:16 BST Updated on 6 April 2021,
12:49 BST
·
·
Stocks tied to the Archegos
Capital Management crisis fell in premarket trading after Credit Suisse
Group AG was said to have hit the market with block
trades that totaled more than $2 billion, the latest bulk share sale as
part of a fallout from the liquidation of Bill Hwang’s fund.
ViacomCBS Inc. slipped 3% and Vipshop
Holdings
Ltd. dropped 2% as of 7:40 a.m. in New York, while Farfetch
Ltd. declined 2.7% after the Swiss bank unloaded shares. Credit Suisse was
up 0.8% in Zurich trading, even after saying it will take a 4.4 billion-franc
($4.7 billion) writedown
tied to the implosion of Archegos. Futures contracts on the S&P 500 Index
were down 0.2%.
Shares of companies involved in earlier block trades
totaling more than $20 billion have had a rocky ride after Hwang and his
private investment firm, Archegos, became the center of one of the biggest
margin calls of all time. A basket of equally weighted shares linked to the
fund has slumped about 35% since hitting a peak on March 22, according to data
compiled by Bloomberg.
“The aftermath of the Archegos Capital meltdown appears to
be mostly priced in,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda Corp.
“Prime brokerages will have to deal with further regulatory reviews and greater
transparency may end up being required to avoid family offices from
circumventing federal security laws. The worst from the Archegos Capital blowup
should be behind us.”
The cascade of trading losses has
reverberated from New York to Zurich to Tokyo and beyond as banks tallied their
exposure to the massive unwinding of leveraged equity bets by Archegos. Last
month, giant block trades were initiated by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan
Stanley after Archegos failed to meet margin calls. That left Nomura Holdings
Inc. and Credit Suisse facing potentially significant losses .
About 34 million shares in
ViacomCBS were offered on Monday, 14 million shares of Vipshop and 11 million
shares of Farfetch. That’s only a fraction of the size traded by banks at the
end of March.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-06/archegos-linked-stocks-drop-after-fresh-2-billion-block-trades?srnd=premium-europe
Credit Suisse May Let Fund
Clients Take Hit on Greensill Losses By Patrick
Winters and Marion
Halftermeyer 6 April 2021, 12:43 BST
·
·
Credit Suisse Group AG is leaning toward letting
clients foot the bill for eventual losses in funds that the bank ran with
former billionaire Lex Greensill’s company, according to a person familiar with
the matter.
The bank considers that the risks around Greensill were
known and the funds were only marketed to investors able to assess such risks,
the person said, declining to be identified discussing private matters. The
Zurich-based lender didn’t take any substantial loss due to Greensill in the
first quarter.
The bank’s stance runs counter to reports
last month suggesting executives were considering compensating investors hit by
the collapse of the funds. Credit Suisse marketed its popular supply-chain
finance funds as among the safest investments it offered, because the loans
they held were backed by invoices usually paid in a matter of weeks.
But as the funds grew into a $10 billion strategy, they
strayed from that pitch and much of the money was lent through Greensill
Capital against expected future invoices, for sales that were merely
predicted . Now, investors in the frozen funds are left facing the potential
for steep losses as the assets are liquidated.
A spokesperson for the bank declined to comment on the
funds.
The bank may be able to limit the fund losses to around
$1.5 billion, assuming insurance pays out and it is able to recover other
assets in court, another person said.
The lender has said previously that it plans to make a further
cash payment to investors in the funds by early to mid-April and has
returned about $3.1 billion to date.
Read
More: Credit Suisse Takes $4.7 Billion Archegos Hit, Cuts Dividend (3)
On Tuesday, Credit Suisse said it is
shaking up its executive ranks after it was hit hard by the collapse of
Archegos Capital Management, just weeks after the Greensill scandal. The bank
will take a 4.4 billion franc ($4.7 billion) write-down tied to the implosion
of Archegos and replace more than half a dozen executives, including the chief
risk & compliance officer and the head of the investment bank.
The bank said it may make a further
announcement on its recovery of assets in the Greensill funds in the next week.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-06/credit-suisse-may-let-fund-clients-take-hit-on-greensill-losses?srnd=premium-europe
Finally, yet more
funny money creation. What could possibly go wrong? Try asking the geniuses at
Credit Swiss.
China
Creates its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy A cyber yuan
stands to give Beijing power to track spending in real time, plus money that
isn’t linked to the dollar-dominated global financial system
April 5, 2021 10:48 am ET
A thousand years ago, when money meant coins, China
invented paper currency. Now the Chinese government is minting cash digitally,
in a re-imagination of money that could shake a pillar of American power.
It might seem money is already virtual, as credit cards and
payment apps such as Apple
Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have foreshadowed a
potential digital future for money, though they exist outside the traditional
global financial system and aren’t legal tender like cash issued by
governments.
China’s version of a digital currency is controlled by its
central bank, which will issue the new electronic money. It is expected to give
China’s government vast new tools to monitor both its economy and its people.
By design, the digital yuan will negate one of bitcoin’s major draws: anonymity
for the user.
Beijing is also positioning the digital yuan for
international use and designing it to be untethered to the global financial
system, where the U.S. dollar has been king since World War II. China is
embracing digitization in many forms, including money, in a bid to gain more
centralized control while getting a head start on technologies of the future
that it regards as up for grabs.
“In order to protect our currency sovereignty and legal
currency status, we have to plan ahead,” said Mu Changchun, who is shepherding
the project at the People’s Bank of China.
Digitized money could reorder the fundamentals of finance
the way Amazon.com Uber Technologies
That an authoritarian state and U.S. rival has taken the
lead to introduce a national digital currency is propelling what was once a
wonky topic for cryptocurrency theorists into a point of anxiety in Washington.
Asked in recent weeks how digitized
national currencies such as China’s might affect the dollar, Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have said the issue is
being studied in earnest, including whether a digital dollar makes sense
someday.
The dollar has faced challengers
before—the euro, to name one—only to grow more important when rivals’
shortcomings became apparent. The dollar far outstrips all other currencies for
use in international foreign-exchange trades, at 88% in the latest rankings
from the Bank for International Settlements. The yuan was used in just 4%.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-creates-its-own-digital-currency-a-first-for-major-economy-11617634118?mod=mhp
“I am so clever that sometimes I don't
understand a single word of what I am saying.”
Mu Changchun, with apologies to Oscar Wilde.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Clear link between AstraZeneca
vaccine and rare blood clots in brain, EMA official tells paper April
6, 2021 12:57 PM By Reuters Staff
ROME
(Reuters) - There is a link between AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine and very
rare blood clots in the brain but the possible causes are still unknown, a
senior official for the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said in an interview
published on Tuesday.
“In my opinion we can now say it, it
is clear that there is an association with the vaccine. However, we still do
not know what causes this reaction,” Marco Cavaleri, chair of the vaccine
evaluation team at the EMA, told Italian daily Il Messaggero when asked about
the possible relation between the AstraZeneca shot and cases of brain blood
clots.
Cavaleri added that the EMA would
say there is a link although the regulator would not likely be in a position
this week to give an indication regarding the age of individuals to whom the
AstraZeneca shot should be given.
He did not provide evidence to
support his comments.
AstraZeneca was not immediately
available for comment. It has said previously its studies have found no higher
risk of clots because of the vaccine.
The regulator has consistently said
the benefits outweigh the risks as it investigates 44 reports of an extremely
rare brain clotting ailment known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST)
out of 9.2 million people in the European Economic Area who have received the
AstraZeneca vaccine.
The World Health Organization has
also backed the vaccine.
The EMA said last week that its review
had at present not identified any specific risk factors, such as age, gender or
a previous medical history of clotting disorders, for these very rare events. A
causal link with the vaccine is not proven, but is possible and further
analysis is continuing, the agency said.
A high proportion among the reported
cases affected young and middle-aged women but that did not lead EMA to
conclude this cohort was particularly at risk from AstraZeneca’s shot.
The EMA is expected to give an
update of its investigation on Wednesday.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-astrazeneca-vaccin/clear-link-between-astrazeneca-vaccine-and-rare-blood-clots-in-brain-ema-official-tells-paper-idUSKBN2BT1ER
European countries scramble to
tamp down latest virus surge By
RAFAL NIEDZIELSKI and ANGELA CHARLTON
April 5, 2021
BOCHNIA, Poland (AP) — European countries
scrambled Monday to tamp down a surge in COVID-19 cases and ramp up
vaccinations, hoping to spare hospitals from becoming overwhelmed by the
pandemic’s latest deadly wave of infections.
The crush of coronavirus patients has been
relentless for hospitals in Poland , where daily new
infections hit records of over 35,000 on two recent days and the government
ordered new restrictions to prevent large gatherings over the long Easter
weekend. France’s health minister warned that the number of intensive care unit
patients could match levels from a year ago.
But in a sign of the disparities from one
country to the next, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced
that barbers, gyms and outdoor bar and restaurant patios would be able to
open next week after the country reported progress with vaccines and its recent
lockdown. Meanwhile, the U.S. vaccination campaign kept accelerating, with 40
percent of the nation’s adult population receiving at least one dose.
On Sunday, coronavirus patients filled almost
all of the 120 beds at the County Hospital of Bochnia, 40 kilometers (25 miles)
east of the southern city of Krakow. One patient, 82-year-old Edward Szumanski,
voiced concern that some people still refuse to see the virus that has killed
over 2.8 million people worldwide as a threat. About 55,000 of those deaths
have occurred in Poland.
“The disease is certainly there, and it is very
serious. Those who have not been through it, those who do not have it in their
family, may be deluding themselves, but the reality is different,” he said.
The more contagious and more aggressive virus
variant identified in Britain is fueling much of the increase in Europe.
Meanwhile, voters in many countries are angry at the European Union’s strategy
but also at their own governments’ handling of the pandemic and the failure to
prevent repeated spikes in infections.
France’s health minister, Olivier Veran, warned
Monday that the number of COVID-19 patients in the country’s intensive care
units might match the level of the first crisis a year ago. Speaking on TF1
television, he said the country could approach the ICU saturation levels of
April 2020, when French ICUs held more than 7,000 virus patients, many of whom
were in temporary facilities because demand far outstripped the country’s
pre-pandemic ICU capacity.
---- Authorities in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv,
introduced tighter lockdown restrictions following a recent spike in virus
cases. All schools in the city of 3 million people will be closed for the next
two weeks, and only people with special passes will be allowed on public
transport.
“The hospitals are almost full. The situation
is difficult,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Elsewhere, North Macedonia has delayed mass
immunization amid vaccine shortages as its hospitals fill up following record
new COVID-19 infections and deaths last week.
In Greece, which is struggling to emerge from a
deep recession, most retail stores were
allowed to reopen Monday despite an ongoing surge in COVID-19 infections.
Lockdown measures have been in force since early November, although shops
opened briefly around the Christmas season. The prolonged closures piled
pressure on the economy.
Serbia also has eased measures against the
coronavirus despite high numbers of infections and a slowdown in vaccinations.
The government on Monday allowed bars and restaurants to serve guests outside
at reduced capacity and with respect of social distancing rules.
More
https://apnews.com/article/europe-latest-coronavirus-surge-b80bcc47cfba48fdadfb803a7df2ba07
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.
Today, Sir Isaac
Newton was right. There is no free lunch in science.
Scientists pinpoint source of
"impossible" EmDrive's thrust By Loz Blain April 05, 2021
In
2014, no less an authority than NASA proclaimed in peer-reviewed papers that it
was getting mysterious
thrust from the EmDrive , a strange, brassy trumpet of a
thing that its creators claimed could produce thrust with no propellant. NASA's
findings replicated 2009 experiments in China. A zero-propellant thruster? The
world sat up and listened.
The
ability to generate thrust without having to carry the parasitic mass of fuel
would be a game-changer in space, and even if the EmDrive's experimental thrust
figures were small (720 millinewtons per 2.5 kW of input power in the 2009
Chinese experiment), they'd be several times more effective per weight and per
watt of input than current ion propulsion
systems , which need to carry fuel.
The trouble is, where ion
drives are easily explained (a propellant is ionized, then
electromagnetically thrown out the back of the thruster to push the vehicle forward),
nobody could figure out how the EmDrive was producing Newtons while apparently disagreeing
with Newton on the whole conservation of energy thing.
The inventor had a theory , but so did German scientists Martin Tajmar,
Oliver Neunzig and Marcel Weikert, and the three have spent the last four years
fine-tuning their experiments to prove it. In
2018, the team showed some weird results suggesting that the EmDrive's
thrust didn't seem to be coming from the EmDrive itself, and they hypothesized
that the results were possibly something to do with electromagnetic
interference from the prototype's power cables interacting with the Earth's
magnetic field.
So they set out to eliminate those effects, using an
on-board battery and relocating other components to stop any electromagnetic
effects, and redesigning the experiment to address some hypotheses raised by
other teams trying to get a handle on the EmDrive as well.
Now, the team says it's found exactly where the thrust is
coming from – and it's bad news for EmDrive enthusiasts.
“We found out that the cause of the ‘thrust’ was a thermal
effect," Tajmar told Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell.de . "For our
tests, we used NASA's EmDrive configuration from White et al. (which was used
at the Eagleworks laboratories, because it is best documented and the results
were published in the ‘Journal of Propulsion and Power’. With the aid of a new
measuring scale structure and different suspension points of the same engine,
we were able to reproduce apparent thrust forces similar to those measured by
the NASA-team, but also to make them disappear by means of a point
suspension."
"When power flows into the EmDrive," he
continued, "the engine warms up. This also causes the fastening elements
on the scale to warp, causing the scale to move to a new zero point. We were
able to prevent that in an improved structure. Our measurements refute all
EmDrive claims by at least three orders of magnitude.” The team presented its
results at this year's Space Propulsion 2020+1 conference , which was held online
due to the pandemic.
The entire EmDrive kerfuffle, then, comes down to this:
it's really, really hard to precisely measure tiny amounts of thrust,
and the standard design everyone's been using to figure out how hard the
EmDrive's pushing has been susceptible to an almost imperceptible thermal
expansion that made it look like there was thrust, where there was actually
none. Newton stands undefeated.
In a double victory lap, Tajmar and the team also killed
two other EmDrive variants, the LemDrive , and the Mach-Effect Thruster , saying that while it was
disappointing that the team couldn't verify the claimed capabilities of these
"impossible" engines, at least it had done some great work pushing
measuring technology forward. So hopefully the next impossible drive can be
proven impossible a lot sooner and with less effort.
The German team's paper is freely accessible at ResearchGate , and enjoy EmDrive's explanation of how the
thing was supposed to work in the video below.
[Approx. 14 minutes.]
https://newatlas.com/space/emdrive-dead-thrust-refuted/
In
any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than
to be right alone.
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
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