Baltic Dry Index. 2072 +26 Brent Crude 64.27
Spot Gold 1725
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 05/04/21 World 131,920,255
Deaths 2,866,008
“We
economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you
want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that
retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly
you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.”
In the central bankster fuelled stock casinos, a mixed message from Asia. The US employment numbers of Friday showed the US economy reopening faster than thought with more to come in April and May, but that raises the probability of higher US interest rates sooner than the Fed’s date of the end of 2023.
If the Fed sticks to their lower for longer 2023 date, the USA is headed towards a revival of 1970s style inflation.
Stocks gain, U.S. debts under pressure after bumper jobs data
WASHINGTON—The world’s top economic officials plan to focus at a virtual meeting this week on the prospect of new Covid-19 variants and shutdowns undermining the global rebound, while weighing measures to prevent lasting damage to the poorest and most vulnerable populations.
The international economy is recovering faster than many economists projected just weeks ago, powered by growth in the U.S. and China and by the accelerating pace of vaccinations in many rich countries. Yet a new wave of lockdowns—from Europe to Canada—is threatening that growth, as many low- and middle-income nations with limited resources lag behind.
“The window of opportunity is closing fast,” said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, co-host with the World Bank of the gathering, in previewing the issues facing central bankers and finance ministers. “The longer it takes to speed up vaccine production and rollout, the harder it will be to achieve these gains,” she said.
In a report to be released on Tuesday, the IMF plans to raise its forecast for global growth for this year, from the 5.5% expansion projected in January, Ms. Georgieva said in her presentation Wednesday. That would follow an estimated 3.5% contraction in 2020, the worst peacetime outcome since the Great Depression.
The annual spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank will be held virtually between April 5 and 11, bringing together policy makers from the Group of 20 nations and others. The pandemic response, including vaccine distribution and aid to struggling nations, is expected to dominate the conversations this year. Officials will also discuss ways to rebuild the global economy, with a particular focus on strengthening the resilience against climate change.
More
But in the real global economy far from the central bankster casinos, inflationary pressure is already building due to supply chain problems, plus too much Magic Money Tree money chasing limited supply commodities.
Logjam deepens at the world's ports as pandemic strikes shipping
Issued on: 04/04/2021 - 06:48
---- The ship being offloaded was a South Korean vessel that normally also carries passengers but has been given over entirely to cargo. In the distance, a fleet of other vessels waited offshore.
Lianyungang is not alone.
The global shipping network that keeps food, energy and consumer goods circulating -- and the world economy afloat -- is facing its biggest stress test in memory.
Maritime trade came under the microscope after a Japanese-owned megaship ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking the busy channel for nearly a week.
It was refloated last week but the larger crisis remains, amid warnings that soaring freight costs could affect supplies of key goods or consumer prices.
The situation arose last year as the expanding pandemic jammed the sprawling, predictable patterns by which shipping containers are shared around the world's ports.
When many countries began easing Covid-19 restrictions late last summer, a wave of pent-up demand from hunkered-down consumers bingeing on internet purchases delivered a shock to supply lines.
Exports from nations like China soared.
- Port pile-up -
But since the end of 2020, vessels have piled up outside overburdened Western ports, leaving Asian exporters clamouring for the return of empty containers needed for further shipments.
At Lianyungang -– China's 10th-busiest port, according to the World Shipping Council –- desperate firms are pressing rail-cargo containers into maritime service, placing rush orders for new ones, and rerouting some shipping to other Chinese ports.
The price to ship a 40-foot container from Lianyungang to the United States has soared to more than $10,000, from the usual $2,000-$3,000, Shi said.
The situation is "putting pressure on everyone in the supply chain", he said.
American consumer demand has been a key driver.
The Port of Los Angeles said last month that processed volume in February jumped 47 percent year-on-year, the strongest February in its 114-year history. The number of empty containers stranded there has also soared.
An LA port official told AFP last week that more than two dozen ships were waiting to berth outside Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two busiest ports in the United States.
Normally there is no wait, but delays now average more than a week.
"We basically have a couple of weeks of work, but more ships come in every day," another West Coast port official told AFP.
Compounding the gridlock, many container vessels had been pulled from the market for re-fitting to meet carbon-reduction standards, while social distancing and occasional coronavirus clusters among dockworkers have also slowed processing.
Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka said recently the facility was focused on vaccinating port workers and pushing cargo through.
"It's critical that we clear the backlog of cargo and return more certainty to the Pacific trade," Seroka said.
Commodities information provider S&P Global Platts said vessels were also logjammed in Singapore, the world's busiest container transshipment port, and that sailing-schedule reliability was at a 10-year low.
Not everyone is complaining, though.
Denmark's Maersk, the world's largest container transporter, swung from a loss in 2019 to a $2.9 billion profit last year largely thanks to soaring volumes and higher prices in 2020's final quarter.
But concerns are growing.
German Industry Federation director Holger Losch said in a statement that the situation was beginning to hit German industry.
"Sectors that are dependent on delivery of raw materials or components, as well as the shipping of their finished products... suffer from this in particular," Losch said.
Meanwhile, smaller export-reliant countries from Southeast Asia to Latin America served by lower priority feeder routes are struggling to get their goods to market.
More
In rump-EUSSR news, more lockdowns due to the botched rollout of vaccines.
In another locked down, disrupted Easter, a tired Italy can't escape the virus
April 4, 2021
ROME - In one Italian diocese, three priests contracted the coronavirus in the days leading up to Easter, forcing another 10 clerics to isolate. In another diocese, an infection has pushed 15 priests into isolation. At a parish 20 miles southeast of Rome, both of the priests got sick, forcing the cancellation of days of proceedings, including Easter Mass.
"There will be no celebration," one parishioner said, in an audio message sent to the community.
This was supposed to be the point when Europe had beaten back the virus, allowing a return to semi-normalcy for Catholicism's holiest week. But Italy, like much of Europe, is still besieged by infections, and the Easter mood this year feels nowhere near celebratory. Whether through lockdowns, sickness or canceled church ceremonies, the pandemic is still finding ways to interfere.
----For Catholics across the world, this is the second Easter taking place amid the pandemic. And while the endpoint is emerging in a few countries, like the United States, that have raced ahead with vaccinations, the picture is different in Europe, where the rollout has been dismally slow, and half the continent's nations are in some form of lockdown.
That has made this strange Easter perhaps even harder to stomach than the last one. While the collective sense of fear has diminished, people are contending instead with disillusionment, economic pain and continued isolation. Restrictions aren't nearly as strict as those a year ago - in part because people know more about what behaviors are riskiest - but holidays still come with a laundry list of confusing rules. In Italy, two adults can visit family or friends; three cannot.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, noting the surge in infections, said Easter this year should be "quiet." In Paris, thousands of officers were deployed to enforce new restrictions, including a ban on movement of more than six miles from home.
More
https://www.chron.com/news/article/In-another-locked-down-disrupted-Easter-a-tired-16075735.php
Paris medics fear worst of Covid wave still to come
Adam PLOWRIGHT Sun, 4 April 2021, 6:47 am
In the Covid-19 intensive care unit of the Antony Private Hospital south of Paris, no bed stays free for long and medics wonder when their workload will finally peak.
As one recovered elderly patient is being wheeled out of the ward, smiling weakly, boss Jean-Pierre Deyme is on the phone arranging the next arrival and calling out instructions to staff.
Louisa Pinto, a nurse of nearly 20 years' experience, gestures to the vacated room where a cleaner is already at work, scrubbing down the mattress for the next arrival.
"The bed won't even have time to cool down," she says as the patient monitoring system beeps constantly in the background.
For now, everything is stable in the 20-odd beds around her where Covid-19 victims lie inanimate, in a silent battle with the virus.
Paris is going through a third wave of the pandemic which risks putting even more strain on saturated hospitals than the first wave in March and April last year.
"With what's coming in April, it's going to be very complicated," says Pinto, a mother of three who hasn't had a holiday since last summer and like other staff will be cancelling a planned break this month.
Even with a new round of restrictions coming into force this week, Health Minister Olivier Veran predicts that infections in France will peak only in mid-April, while hospital admissions will continue climbing until the end of the month.
Alarming forecasts leaked to the French media from the Paris public hospital authority AP-HP last week showed anywhere from 2,800-4,400 people in intensive care in the Paris region by the end of April even with a strict lockdown.
In the first wave, the number peaked at 2,700.
More
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/paris-medics-fear-worst-covid-054707057.html
France cuts economic growth forecast to 5% amid lockdown
April 3, 2021 11:42 PM By Reuters Staff
PARIS (Reuters) - The French economy will expand by 5% in 2021, Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a newspaper interview, as a third lockdown to tackle the coronavirus pandemic has prompted a downward revision in the previous government forecast for 6% growth.
The new forecast was prudent, Le Maire said in comments published on Sunday in Le Journal Du Dimanche (JDD).
“Our fundamentals are sound; we will be able to bounce back,” Le Maire said.
French schools and non-essential stores such as clothing chains will now be shut for four weeks, after COVID-19 cases surged in recent weeks, edging up the number of patients in intensive care units.
Bars and restaurants have already been closed for months, while tourist travel is at a standstill, although unlike when France entered its first national lockdown a year ago, construction work and manufacturing are among business areas still ticking over.
Like many countries in Europe, France has ploughed billions of euros into propping up struggling companies with state-backed loans, help with rents and partial unemployment schemes.
The latest restrictions will force some 150,000 businesses to temporarily close, and aid measures in April will cost 11 billion euros, the finance ministry has said.
Le Maire has repeatedly called for the European Union to accelerate the ratification and implementation of its 750 billion-euro economic stimulus plan.
He told the JDD that France was now unlikely to get the 5 billion euro disbursement from that scheme in July as planned, due to delays.
More
Finally, in EV manufacturing land, caveat emptor. All that glitters isn’t necessarily gold. Something about fools rushing comes to mind, but in the central bankster fuelled Magic Money Tree forest environment, fear of missing out (FOMO) rules just about everything.
But for how much longer?
Below, the Emperor’s new clothes, SPACs.
EV Companies Went Public With Big Plans. They’re Quickly Hitting Snags.
Stocks fall after companies disclose in first earnings calls that they missed goals set before SPAC mergers
April 2, 2021 8:10 am ET
Over the past year, the stock market has been deluged with newly public electric-vehicle startups that raised money by pitching plans for rapid growth.
Months into their lives on the public markets, a set of these companies are missing targets, adding costs and, in one case, upending major parts of a business model.
On Monday, aspiring electric car and truck maker Canoo Inc. GOEV -0.44% told investors it was abandoning or scaling back numerous key aspects of the strategy laid out when it raised $630 million last year. On Tuesday, five-year-old electric-vehicle battery maker Romeo Power Inc. RMO -0.60% said it expected that revenue for the year would be no more than $40 million. That is far shy of the $140 million projected when it raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors last year.
Lordstown Motors Corp. RIDE 2.38% disclosed in mid-March that its capital expenses through the end of 2022 would be more than double the amount projected last year when the electric-pickup-truck startup raised $780 million from investors.
A fourth, electric-vehicle company XL Fleet Corp. XL -12.14% , said Wednesday it was facing problems because of the “ongoing impacts” of Covid-19 on the truck market and wouldn’t provide formal guidance about its 2021 revenue. The company previously told investors it expected 2021 revenue to more than triple to $75 million; its first-quarter revenue is expected to be $1 million, flat from the year before.
All four companies characterized the challenges as surmountable and told investors they still expect robust demand and growth in years to come. Investors were less sanguine: The stocks of all four companies fell on the developments, ranging from a 12% drop for XL Fleet to a 21% decline for Canoo the day after the announcements.
The revelations so soon after the companies’ listings illustrate that quickly building new auto giants from scratch can be more challenging than many of the companies had projected. All four announced the struggles on their first quarterly conference calls as public companies.
Just months earlier, the companies outlined their plans for rapid growth to investors in slideshow presentations that all featured charts showing fast-rising revenue and profits.
“These companies are finding it is harder to actually take that PowerPoint slide and get a product out of it than was envisioned,” said Jon Lopez, an analyst at investment bank Vertical Group who follows the sector. “If you’re having to reposition or pivot already, what’s going to happen in three years or five years?” he asked, noting there would then be far more competition from traditional auto makers.
Ever since Tesla Inc.’s stock took off mid-last year, the electric-vehicle space has been a searing hot sector, as investors have hunted for companies they hope to replicate the electric-car pioneer’s stock-market success.
----While there has been a pullback in share prices in recent weeks, the trend was aided by a boom of special-purpose acquisition companies. A SPAC is a Wall Street tool that allows companies with no assets beyond cash to merge with private companies and bring those companies onto the stock market.
At least 22 electric vehicle and battery companies have struck deals to go public through SPACs in the past year, raising more than $17 billion from investors, according to data from Baris Guzel, a principal at BMW i Ventures, a venture capital investor funded by BMW AG. That group includes several companies that have yet to complete their mergers, including Lucid Motors Inc. and Faraday Future.
Helping fuel the SPAC boom is a practice that allows startups to publicly disclose revenue and profit projections—strongly discouraged by regulations in the traditional route of going public but allowed in SPACs.
These projections have helped the young electric-vehicle companies achieve multibillion-dollar valuations, even before many of them have generated any revenue.
More
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
UK says 5 million get second shot as COVID daily deaths fall to 10
April 3, 2021 4:21 PM
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain reported 10 deaths from COVID-19 within 28 days of a positive test on Saturday, the lowest daily figure since early September, as its vaccine rollout reached another milestone.
Official data also showed 31,301,267 people had received their first shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, with five million now having had both doses in what is the fastest rollout in Europe.
“Our spectacular vaccination programme has now delivered over five million second doses, giving those most vulnerable to COVID - including half of all those aged over 80 - the best possible protection,” health minister Matt Hancock said in a statement.
Britain remains on track to hit the government’s target of offering a vaccine shot to all over-50s by mid-April and all adults by the end of July, the government said
The latest data also showed there were 3,423 new cases, a slight rise from 3,402 reported the day before, though unlike countries such as France and Germany which are battling a third wave of the coronavirus, infections in Britain have been steadily falling.
Strict lockdown measures in England began to be eased on March 29 and Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to update the country with further details about lifting restrictions on Monday, including whether outdoor hospitality can reopen on April 12 as planned.
How the EU blew it and won’t see the COVID-19 pandemic end any time soon
Eric Reguly Published 3 April, 2021
The European Union blew it – badly.
The EU pandemic is not going to end any time soon. It is actually getting worse as the concept of herd immunity enters the realm of fantasy. There will be a lot more illness, a lot more deaths and an economic recovery that will lag America’s and Britain’s by as much as a year.
It didn’t have to be this way.
By the end of the week, as Europeans were heading into an Easter weekend they once assumed would be open and festive, country after country was going back into lockdown. They had to because the new variants of the virus, which are more contagious and perhaps deadlier, were taking over, pushing ICUs to their limits.
All of Italy will be in tight, “red zone” lockdown over the four-day Easter holiday, though most Italians won’t know the difference, as two-thirds of the country has been in lockdown for several weeks. Restrictions on movement and shop openings will remain in place until the end of April.
On Wednesday French President Emmanuel Macron announced a four-week lockdown, including school closures – a humiliating U-turn for him. He had opposed new restrictions, probably because they do not win votes, and he is gearing up for an election run this time next year. Germany last week implemented new border restrictions and could go into full lockdown, too.
We all know that the EU’s botched vaccine rollout is at the heart of the fresh pandemic crisis. The bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, was the exclusive buyer of approved vaccines on behalf of the 27 member countries and moved too slowly to secure supplies. It got bogged down in contract negotiations, fiddling over liability clauses and pricing. By Thursday, the EU had administered the first dose of two-dose vaccines to 11.2 per cent of its population, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. In Britain, the equivalent figure was 46.3 per cent; in the United States, 29.4 per cent. Even laggard Canada, at 12.9 per cent, has nudged ahead of the EU.
EU governments in recent months resisted tight restrictions, even though the scandalously low vaccination rate allowed numbers of COVID-19 cases to surge.
Never mind that the countries that took a zero-tolerance approach to new infections – Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam, among them – were the ones returning to economic health the fastest. Their view was that tight snap lockdowns, combined with robust contact tracing, were the best way to protect the economy and save lives. Australia has largely reopened and has recorded only 909 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
EU countries locked down too late and too lightly when clusters were detected. Look who’s suffering now? Italy has recorded almost 110,000 deaths and is closing down again.
All bets on the proximate date for a return to normal life are off, and a new sense of doom is setting in. The slow vaccine rollout and the premature easing of restrictions were a biological red carpet for the new variants. Herd immunity will come at some point, but that point is being pushed farther into the future.
More
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
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.
No update today. Normal service tomorrow.
“The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
No comments:
Post a Comment