By Hideyuki
Sano
TOKYO (Reuters) -A batch of Chinese
and U.S. economic data helped underpin global stocks near record highs on
Friday, as investors priced in a solid global recovery from the
coronavirus-induced slump.
In Asia, markets were largely steady
after China reported a sharp acceleration in first quarter growth, though the
reading slightly undershot expectations while retail sales bounced strongly
last month.
Shanghai shares dipped 0.2% while
the Chinese yuan eased.
Analysts said the China data did
little to change expectations of a strong recovery and further policy
tightening to curb any excesses in property investments.
“Property investments were weaker
but that’s no surprise given policy makers have been tightening loans to the
sector while consumption is continuing a normalisation,” said Ei Kaku, senior
strategist at Nomura.
“On the whole the data is unlikely
to have a big impact.”
MSCI’s broadest index of
Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was off 0.2% while Japan’s Nikkei was almost
flat.
---- “U.S. economic data released yesterday
was all strong, confirming the U.S. economy is firmly on a recovery track,”
said Norihiro Fujito, chief investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan
Stanley Securities.
U.S. retail sales rebounded 9.8% in
March, the largest increase since May 2020, in a gain that pushed the level of
sales 17.1% above its pre-pandemic level to a record high.
The brightening economic prospects
were underscored by other data, including first-time claims for unemployment
benefits tumbling last week to the lowest level since March 2020.
Despite strong data, U.S. bond
yields dropped, in part driven by Japanese buying, as they have began a new
financial year this month.
The 10-year U.S. Treasuries yield
dropped to 1.529%, a five-week low, on Thursday and last stood at 1.578%, off
its 14-month high of 1.776% set at the end of March.
---- “The market has already fully priced in
an U.S. economic recovery in the near term. And if the Federal Reserve will
keep interest rates on hold for the next two to three years, no doubt the carry
of U.S. bonds would be very attractive compared with Japanese or euro zone
bonds,” said Chotaro Morita, chief fixed income strategist at SMBC Nikko
Securities.
The fall in long-term bond yields
benefited stocks, and particularly tech shares, given the idea that their
historically expensive valuations can be justified because investors would have
no choice but to buy shares to make up for low returns from bonds.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500
advanced 1.11% while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite added 1.31%, nearing its
record peak set in February.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets/world-stocks-near-record-highs-as-china-u-s-data-back-global-recovery-hopes-idUSKBN2C3062
Inflation Watch. Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our
spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Epic drought means water crisis
on Oregon-California border By
GILLIAN FLACCUS April 14, 2021
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Hundreds of
farmers who rely on a massive irrigation project that spans the
Oregon-California border learned Wednesday they will get a tiny fraction of the
water they need amid the worst drought in decades, as federal regulators
attempt to balance the needs of agriculture against federally threatened and
endangered fish species that are central to the heritage of several tribes.
Oregon’s governor said the prolonged
drought in the region has the “full attention of our offices,” and she is
working with congressional delegates, the White House and federal agencies to
find relief for those affected.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
briefed irrigators, tribes and environmental groups early Wednesday after
delaying the decision a month. The federally owned irrigation project will draw
33,000 acre-feet of water from Upper Klamath Lake, which farmers said was
roughly 8% of what they need in such a dry year. Water deliveries will also
start June 1, two months later than usual, for the 1,400 irrigators who farm
the 225,000 acres (91,000 hectares).
“The simple fact is it just hasn’t
rained or snowed this year. We all know how dry our fields are, and the rest of
the watersheds are in the same boat. ... There is no easy way to say this,” Ben
DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, told several dozen
irrigators who gathered in Klamath Falls on Wednesday morning to hear the news.
----
The seasonal allocations are the most dramatic development in the region since
irrigation water was all but cut off to hundreds of farmers in 2001 amid
another severe drought — the first time the interests of farmers took a
backseat to those of fish and tribes.
---- The Yurok Tribe, one of the tribes
affected by the water decision, said that even with the slashes to farmers’
water, they were facing a “catastrophic loss” of salmon this year.
“The Yurok Tribe is suffering
significant economic damage on top of the extreme cultural and social impacts
of failing fish runs,” said tribal Vice Chairman Frankie Myers.
More
https://apnews.com/article/fish-droughts-lakes-oregon-environment-c113d9a6a963cf461fab15441b3b2628
Retail sales explode in March as
consumers use stimulus checks to spend heavily Published Thu, Apr 15 2021 8:31 AM EDT
A fresh batch of stimulus checks
sent consumer purchases surging in March as the U.S. economy continued to get
juice from aggressive congressional spending.
Retail sales rose 9.8% for the
month, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. That compared to the Dow
Jones estimate of a 6.1% gain and a decline of 2.7% in February.
Sporting goods, clothing and food
and beverage led the gains in spending and contributed to the best month for
retail since the May 2020 gain of 18.3%, which came after the first round of
stimulus checks.
A separate report showed that first-time
filings for unemployment insurance plunged, with the Labor Department reporting
576,000 new jobless claims for the week ended April 10. That was easily the
lowest total since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and represented a
sharp decline from the previous week’s total of 769,000.
As the jobs picture brightened,
consumers took their $1,400 stimulus checks and spent aggressively. The money
came courtesy of the nearly $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that
Congress passed in March.
The legislation took total stimulus
and rescue payments approved in the year since the Covid-19 pandemic began to
about $5 trillion, fueled by red ink that fiscal authorities say is necessary
to keep the economy running.
Spending for the month was
broad-based.
The critical bar and restaurant
industry saw a 13.4% surge, thanks to the increasing relaxing of restrictions
as Covid vaccines accelerate to a pace of more than 3 million a day.
Sporting goods spending was the
highest percentage gainer at 23.5%, followed by clothing and accessories at
18.3% and motor vehicle parts and dealers at 15.1%.
March’s retail sales report was yet
another sign that consumers overall remain healthy and willing to spend, even
though increasing amounts of stimulus checks are going towards savings rather
than spending.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/us-retail-sales-march-2021.html
Inflation can occur in nearly any product
or service, including need-based expenses such as housing, food, medical care,
and utilities, as well as want expenses, such as cosmetics, automobiles, and jewellery.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111314/what-causes-inflation-and-does-anyone-gain-it.asp
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Poland starts J&J COVID-19
jabs, says benefits outweigh risks April 15, 2021 1:16 PM
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland started
administering Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shots on Thursday as benefits from
the vaccine outweigh potential risks, government and drug office
representatives said.
U.S. federal health agencies on
Tuesday recommended pausing use of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine for at least
a few days after six women under age 50 developed rare blood clots after
receiving the shot, dealing a fresh setback to efforts to tackle the pandemic.
“In the case of Johnson &
Johnson today is the first day it has been used. We have not received signals
that there are problems, or that patient are refusing (to take it),” Michal
Dworczyk, a government official overseeing the country’s vaccine programme told
a press conference.
The head of the Office for
Registration of Medicinal Products told the conference that benefits from the
J&J vaccine outweigh potential risks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-poland-vaccine/poland-starts-jj-covid-19-jabs-says-benefits-outweigh-risks-idUSKBN2C21LU?il=0
J&J vaccine to remain in
limbo while officials seek evidence By
LAURAN NEERGAARD and MIKE STOBBE April
14, 2021
Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19
vaccine will remain in limbo for a while longer after government health
advisers declared Wednesday that they need more evidence to decide if a handful
of unusual blood clots were linked to the shot — and if so, how big the risk
really is.
The reports are exceedingly rare —
six cases out of more than 7 million U.S. inoculations with the one-dose vaccine.
But the government recommended a pause in J&J vaccinations this week, not
long after European regulators declared that such clots are a rare but possible
risk with the AstraZeneca vaccine, a shot made in a similar way but not yet
approved for use in the U.S.
At an emergency meeting, advisers to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrestled with the fact that the
U.S. has enough alternative shots to vaccinate its population but other
countries anxiously awaiting the one-and-done vaccine may not.
“I continue to feel like we’re in a
race against time and the variants, but we need to (move forward) in the safest
possible way,” said CDC adviser Dr. Grace Lee of Stanford University, who was
among those seeking to postpone a vote on the vaccine.
Authorities have studied the clots
for only a few days and have little information to judge the shot, agreed
fellow adviser Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington.
“I don’t want to send the message
there is something fundamentally wrong with this vaccine,” Bell said. “It’s a
very rare event. Nothing in life is risk-free. But I want to be able to
understand and defend the decision I’ve made based on a reasonable amount of
data.”
These are not run-of-the-mill blood clots. They
occurred in unusual places, in veins that drain blood from the brain, and in
people with abnormally low levels of clot-forming platelets. The six cases
raised an alarm bell because that number is at least three times more than
experts would have expected to see even of more typical brain-drainage clots,
said CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro.
More
https://apnews.com/article/cdc-johnson-johnson-vaccine-blood-clot-0b726cc1007ce3cbe374f5eb8b48ce8b
German
Hospitals Near Breaking Point, With Cases Still Rising By Tim Loh 15 April 2021, 10:39 BST
·
·
Germany’s health-care system is getting stretched to the
brink, with many hospitals overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients and rising case
numbers pointing to tougher days ahead.
The occupancy rate in intensive-care units rose to 88% on
Wednesday, the highest in more than a year.
Some hospitals need to “significantly reduce” elective
procedures and relocate stable patients to other parts of the country to cope,
said Lothar Wieler, head of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute public health
agency.
“The situation is getting dramatically worse,” Wieler said
at a press conference Thursday as Germany reported 31,117 new cases, the most
since mid-January.
Infections Accelerating Only about 17% of the country’s population has received at
least one Covid shot, and it could be months before a majority gets vaccinated.
Meanwhile, the more transmissible virus variant that was first identified in
the U.K. now accounts for about 90% of new cases, according to Wieler.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-15/german-hospitals-near-breaking-point-with-cases-still-rising?srnd=premium-europe
Virus variants inciting India's
second surge, epidemiologists say April
15, 2021 1:39 PM By Neha
Arora , Shilpa
Jamkhandikar
NEW
DELHI (Reuters) - The second surge of COVID-19 cases in India has swamped
hospitals much faster than the first because mutations in the virus mean each
patient is infecting many more people than before, epidemiologists and doctors
say.
India’s daily infections skyrocketed
more than 20-fold to more than 200,000 on Thursday since a multi-month-low in
early February, though the government has played down the role of mutants in
the latest rise, the worst anywhere this month.
The world’s hardest-hit country
after the United States has reported about 950 cases of people contracting the
variants first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.
“The point is that these variants of
concern are still not on top of the discourse,” said epidemiologist Rajib
Dasgupta of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“Even if it is a new variant, you
need to do the same things” to control it and treat patients “but it requires a
different urgency to recognise that”, he said.
Doctors at New Delhi’s All India
Institute of Medical Sciences have found that one patient is now infecting up
to nine in 10 contacts, compared with up to four last year.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-infection/virus-variants-inciting-indias-second-surge-epidemiologists-say-idUSKBN2C21O7
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.
Awaiting the next historic solar
storm Posted by Kelly Kizer Whitt
in Human World | Sun | March 31, 2021
Researchers uncovering eyewitness accounts
of powerful solar storms of the past say we should expect at least one
super-storm from the sun per century.
Powerful solar storms can hammer Earth, causing major
technology glitches. One of the best-remembered events is the Quebec power grid failure of 1989 , a 12-hour blackout in
which millions of people found themselves in dark office buildings, stalled
elevators, and underground pedestrian tunnels. Going farther back, there’s the
famous Carrington Event of 1859 , which fried telegraph wires.
Scientists agree it’s only a matter of time until the next powerful solar storm
affects earthly technologies. Next time, we might expect steeper consequences,
since today’s world relies so heavily on technology. But, with few events to go
on, no one knows when the next powerful Earth-directed event will erupt on the
sun. That’s one reason researchers were happy to announce in March 2021 that they’ve unearthed new
eyewitness accounts from a 1582 solar storm that startled skywatchers across
the globe.
Pero Ruiz Soares was a 16th-century Portuguese author in
Lisbon. He and his contemporaries were unaware of the connection between solar storms and the northern lights
when he wrote of the 1582 event:
A great fire appeared in the sky to the north, and
lasted three nights.
All that part of the sky appeared burning in fiery
flames; it seemed that the sky was burning. Nobody remembered having seen
something like that … At midnight, great fire rays arose above the castle which
were dreadful and fearful. The following day, it happened the same at the same
hour but it was not so great and terrifying. Everybody went to the countryside
to see this great sign.
According to a statement from scientists who studied the event:
Across the globe in feudal Japan, observers in Kyoto
noted the same fiery red display in their skies, too. Similar accounts of
strange nighttime lights were recorded in Leipzig, Germany; Yecheon, South
Korea; and a dozen other cities across Europe and East Asia.
During those few days in 1582, people looking skyward – not
understanding what they saw – were marveling at a strong display of the
northern lights, or aurora borealis, which was little understood at the time
and the subject of many myths and legends . The northern lights are seen mostly
at high latitudes on Earth. They’re not often seen at lower latitudes, like
Portugal. That’s another thing a powerful solar storm can do, however; it can
cause northern lights to be seen closer to Earth’s equator.
Today’s researchers look to uncover events in the past,
such as the 1582 solar storm, in order to investigate the pattern of these
strong storms on the sun. They want to know how often they occur. They hope
historical records, like that of the 1582 storm, will help them predict future
solar storms. At present, with scientists’ limited understanding of the
patterns, the historical record suggests that such powerful Earth-sun events
occur at least once a century. Their statement said:
The historical record seems to suggest
that major storms like the one in 1582 are, at minimum, a once-in-a-century
occurrence, and so we should expect one or more of them to hit Earth in the
21st century
The
sun waxes and wanes in activity on about an 11-year cycle. Solar
Cycle 25 officially began in late 2020. In other words,
we’re heading toward another solar
maximum , when the sun should be at its most active.
Scientists expect this solar maximum to occur around 2025.
more
https://earthsky.org/human-world/next-solar-storm-carrington-event-historic-aurora?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=67fb8eaca7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-67fb8eaca7-394244537
Another weekend
and a weekend to give some serious thought to a large bout of inflation ahead,
and how to mitigate it personally, insofar as that is practical. Have a great
weekend everyone.
Once inflation becomes prevalent throughout
an economy, the expectation of further inflation becomes an overriding
concern in the consciousness of consumers and businesses alike.
---- Inflation can be a concern because it
makes money saved today less valuable tomorrow. Inflation erodes a consumer's
purchasing power and can even interfere with the ability to retire.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111314/what-causes-inflation-and-does-anyone-gain-it.asp
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