Baltic Dry Index. 3266 +109 Brent Crude 69.08
Spot Gold 1788
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 06/05/21 World 155,940,157
Deaths 3,255,494
The lesson is clear. Inflation devalues us all.
Margaret Thatcher.
The big news this UK election day is in the Global Inflation section and in the Covid-19 section.
Look away from the price of crude oil and the modified, more volatile, Baltic Dry Index now.
In the trade war and war of words between Australia and China, China yesterday doubled down.
The good news from a UK perspective, with a new trade deal going into effect, China’s Aussie wine loss will likely be the UK’s gain. More Ozzie wine at cheaper prices, and best of all, coming in a year that a late frost has severely damaged French wine production. Thank you President Xi.
Below, the US economy and Chinas economy are both predicted to rise by 6 percent this year. Given all the Magic Money Tree free fiat money President Biden is about to tip into the US economy this year, that 6 percent forecast for the US economy might be an under-estimate.
“This year, both the U.S. and Chinese economy could grow 6% or more. If the world’s two biggest economies are growing that much, clearly that’s positive,” said Norihiro Fujito, chief investment strategist, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.
Asia shares, commodities firm on recovery bets; A$ hit by China move
We could be at a generational turning point for finance. Politics, economics, international relations, demography and labor are all shifting to supporting inflation. After more than 40 years of policies that gave priority to the fight against rising prices, investor- and consumer-friendly solutions are becoming less fashionable, not only in the U.S. but in much of the world.
Investors are woefully unprepared for such a shift, perhaps because such historic turning points have proven remarkably hard to spot. This may be another false alarm, and it will take many years to play out, but the evidence for a general shift is strong across five fronts.
1) Central banks, led by the Federal Reserve, are now less concerned about inflation
Since the global financial crisis policy makers have spent much more time worrying about inflation coming in below their targets than above. But recently they have taken decisive steps away from the targets. The Fed has adopted a new, softer target of average inflation of 2%, meaning it can overshoot for years to make up for the past decade’s misses.
Furthermore, it has shifted from focusing on trying to act in advance of inflation based on its forecasts, to waiting until inflation actually arrives. With monetary policy’s effect on the economy famously having long and variable lags behind, as Milton Friedman emphasized, this raises the probability that the Fed acts too late to rein in rising inflation.
Under both Janet Yellen, now Treasury secretary, and current Chairman Jerome Powell, the Fed has also emphasized what it had previously treated as a secondary target of full employment. In particular, it is focused on the benefits for marginalized workers, including minority racial groups, of running the economy hot. The flip side is that when it comes time for the Fed to slow the economy, these groups will know they are being hit first by Fed tightening—which could make it even more contentious than usual for the Fed to raise rates rapidly.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/everything-screams-inflation-11620163599?mod=mhp
Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.
Ludwig von Mises.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Pfizer/BioNTech jab confirmed to protect 95% in largest study yet
Issued on:
The largest real-world study yet of the Pfizer/BioNTec vaccine on Thursday confirmed that the jab provided more than 95 percent protection against Covid-19, but found that the level dropped significantly when people received just one of the two prescribed doses.
The authors of the research from Israel's national vaccination campaign said it showed real-world proof that the pandemic could be ended by rapid, global vaccination programmes.
An analysis of public health data from Israel -- one of the countries with the highest proportion of fully-vaccinated adults -- showed the vaccine was extremely effective in protecting even elderly individuals at a time when the more infectious English variant was dominant, according to the results published in the Lancet medical journal.
By the start of April, nearly 5 million people in Israel had received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, more than 70 percent of the population.
The study found that two doses conveyed 95.3 percent protection against infection and 96.7 protection against death seven days after the second dose.
After 14 days, that protection increased to 96.5 percent and 98 percent, respectively.
But the protection was considerably lower when people received just a single vaccine dose.
Between seven and 14 days after the first dose, protection against infection was found to be 57.7 percent, and protection against death 77 percent.
The authors said that one dose may provide a shorter window of protection, especially in an environment where new viral variants emerge.
"Importantly, the study shows that two doses of the vaccine significantly increase levels of immunity and protection," said Jonathan Ball, professor of Molecular Virology at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the research.
"This is why it is important that people get both doses."
During the analysis period, there were 232,268 confirmed Covid-19 infections, and nearly 95 percent of samples tested were found to be the English B117 variant. There were 4,481 severe infections and 1,113 deaths.
The team behind the research said that they were not able to study the effect of the South African variant, which has also been identified in Israel.
Before Thursday, the largest real-world study of the Pfizer/BioNTec vaccine, also in Israel, was nearly five times smaller, involving 1.2 million people.
More
WHO says India accounts for 46% of world’s new Covid cases, one in four deaths
Published Wed, May 5 2021 4:29 AM EDT
India accounted for 46% of the new Covid-19 cases recorded worldwide last week and one in four of deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.
The surge of the coronavirus in India, including a highly infectious new variant first identified there, has seen hospitals run out of beds and oxygen, and morgues and crematoriums overflowing. Many people have died in ambulances and car parks waiting for a bed or oxygen.
Worldwide, 5.7 million new cases were reported last week and more than 93,000 deaths, the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological report. India reported nearly 2.6 million new cases, a 20% increase on the previous week, and 23,231 deaths.
The figures are based on official tallies, so India’s proportion could be even larger if, as many experts believe, a large number of cases and deaths are not being recorded there as the system becomes overwhelmed. India accounts for almost 18% of the world’s population.
There are signs that India’s outbreak is spreading to its neighbors. Nepal recorded a 137% increase in cases to 31,088 last week, while Sri Lanka’s Covid-19 outbreak was also growing, the WHO said.
More
The Latest: Nepal extends lockdown for capital amid surge
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Authorities extended a lockdown in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu and surrounding districts by another week on Wednesday as the Himalayan nation recorded its highest daily tolls of COVID-19 infection and death.
The Ministry of Health said Tuesday 7,660 people tested positive for the coronavirus while 55 people had died.
The lockdown notice also said neighborhood grocery stores would be allowed to open only two hours in the morning and there would be further restrictions imposed on movement of vehicles to curb the spiking number of cases.
Nepal halted all domestic flights this week and international flights would be stopped from Thursday.
Nepal has recorded 351,005 cases while 3,417 people have died.
More
Montana tribe gifts vaccines to neighbors across the border
BABB, Mont. (AP) — On a cloudy spring day, hundreds lined up in their cars on the Canadian side of the border crossing that separates Alberta and Montana. They had driven for hours and camped out in their vehicles in hopes of receiving the season’s hottest commodity — a COVID-19 vaccine — from a Native American tribe that was giving out its excess doses.
The Blackfeet tribe in northern Montana provided about 1,000 surplus vaccines last month to its First Nations relatives and others from across the border, in an illustration of the disparity in speed at which the United States and Canada are distributing doses. While more than 30% of adults in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, in Canada that figure is about 3%.
---- More than 95% of the Blackfeet reservation’s roughly 10,000 residents who are eligible for the vaccine are fully immunized, after the state prioritized Native American communities — among the most vulnerable U.S. populations — in the early stages of its vaccination campaign.
The tribe received vaccine allotments both from the Montana health department and the federal Indian Health Service, leaving some doses unused. With an expiration date fast approaching, it turned to other nations in the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes the Blackfeet and three tribes in southern Alberta that share a language and culture.
More
How Common Are Your Covid-19 Vaccine Side Effects?
New data from the CDC shows the rates of side effects after each dose of Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccines
By Theresa Machemer smithsonianmag.com May 4, 2021 3:45PM
As the vaccine rollout continues across America, people are rolling up their sleeves—and bracing for side effects, especially after the second dose of the two-part vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. As Katherine J. Wu reported for the Atlantic in February, the second dose of a vaccine can prompt surprisingly strong side effects like fever, chills and fatigue because the immune system is ready to use the skills it learned after the first dose.
Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released data about how often people experienced side effects after the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The data come from electronic diaries that clinical trial volunteers kept for seven days after each injection in order to record side effects. The CDC's dataset is broken down by age and shows that older people tend to report fewer side effects than younger people.
Pain at the injection site is the most common side effect, according to the CDC report. After the first dose of either a Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, just over 70 percent of older people reported pain in their arms, and just over 80 percent of younger people reported pain. Pain was more common after the second dose for recipients of the Moderna vaccine, but slightly less common after the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Less than five percent of people who received the Moderna vaccine reported “Grade 3” pain, which is defined either by pain that prevents a person from completing normal daily activities, or indicates a pain reliever is needed to treat symptoms.
Other side effects at the injection site, like redness and swelling, each affected less than ten percent of people who got the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and less than 20 percent of people who got the Moderna vaccine.
One of the most-talked-about side effects from the vaccines is a fever.
----Chills were another common side effect. About half of younger Moderna recipients, and about a third of younger Pfizer recipients, reported chills after their second dose.
Dozens of vaccine trial participants also reported lymphadenopathy—swollen lymph nodes—after receiving their jabs. The effects tended to appear around the arm and neck within two to four days of the vaccination, and lasted for an average of ten days after the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and one to two days after the Moderna vaccine.
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.
Anode-free sodium battery could cut cost and size from everyday devices
Nick Lavars May 03, 2021
In the ongoing search for materials for new and improved batteries, sodium as a cheap and widely abundant option ticks some important boxes, but bringing these experimental designs up to speed is far from a straightforward undertaking. A new design out of Washington University in St Louis demonstrates a promising path forward, by having a thin layer of copper fulfill the role of one of the electrodes, resulting in a battery that is significantly smaller and less expensive to produce, without compromising on performance.
A typical lithium-ion battery features two electrodes, called the cathode and the anode, which pass ions in an electrolyte solution to one another as the device is charged and discharged. For some time, scientists have explored how sodium metal can replace lithium, with some promising advances being made, and also how these designs might be able to work without the anode component.
“We used old chemistry,” Peng Bai, who led the research. “But the problem has been, with this well-known chemistry, no one ever showed this anode-free battery can have a reasonable lifetime. They always fail very quickly or have a very low capacity or require special processing of the current collector.”
Bai and his team believe they have come up with a solution to these shortcomings, by doing away with the anode and incorporating a thin layer of copper foil instead. This sits on the anode side of the battery's current collector, which gathers the free electrons as the battery is discharged and channels them into the device being powered.
As this experimental battery is charged, instead of the ions passing from the cathode through the separator material to the anode, they plate themselves onto the copper foil and transform into shiny, smooth metal. Then as the battery is discharged, the material dissolves away and the ions are returned to the cathode.
The scientists were able to observe their battery's performance in real time through a purpose-built, transparent capillary cell, which allowed them to spot instabilities and the formation of fatal, tree-like structures called dendrites, which cause batteries to short and fail. This enabled the team to make adjustments, such as reducing the water content in the electrolyte to limit the reactions with the sodium alkali metal, which can normally lead to dendrites.
“All of the battery’s instabilities accumulate during the working process,” Bai says. ”What really matters is instability during the dynamic process, and there’s no method to characterize that. We could clearly see that if you don’t have good quality control of your electrolyte, you’ll see various instabilities."
After ironing out these kinks in their see-through capillary cell, the researchers were able to build a proper working version of their anode-free sodium battery. Despite the lower cost owing to the use of sodium, and the smaller size owing to the elimination of the anode, they report the device had similar performance to a conventional lithium-ion battery.
“We’ve found that the minimal is maximum,” Bai said. “No anode is the best anode.”
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
https://newatlas.com/energy/cheap-compact-sodium-battery-anode-free/
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output... A steady rate of monetary growth at a moderate level can provide a framework under which a country can have little inflation and much growth. It will not produce perfect stability; it will not produce heaven on earth; but it can make an important contribution to a stable economic society.
Milton Friedman.
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