The Drewry World Container Index released Thursday showed the
rate for a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam rose to $10,174, up
3.1% from a week ago and a 485% jump from a year ago. The composite index of
eight major routes rose 2% to $6,257 from a week earlier and was 293% higher
than a year ago, Drewry said . Both were the
highest in records going back to 2011.
In
the U.S. and elsewhere, many shippers of cargo have had to pay in excess of
$10,000 per container in this year’s tight spot market for seaborne freight,
where deals with ocean carriers include hefty surcharges to ensure on-time
delivery or guaranteed loading.
Container rates are surging because demand is outstripping the availability of
the 20- and 40-foot steel boxes that carry the lion’s share of global trade.
Amid strong consumer purchases and company restocking, disruptions ranging from
the Suez Canal blockage in late March to port congestion are causing delays and
higher costs for shippers while ocean carriers enjoy soaring profits.
Earlier on Thursday, Michael O’Sullivan, the CEO of New
Jersey-based clothing retailer Burlington Stores Inc., said “expense headwinds in
supply chain and freight have continued to deteriorate, and these are likely to
weigh on our operating margin throughout the balance of the year.”
Meanwhile, shares of A.P.
Moller-Maersk A/S , the world’s No. 1 container liner, hit a record high
earlier this week. ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd. , an Israeli
carrier that went public in late January, traded this month at more than triple
its IPO price of $15 a share.
High ocean-freight rates have helped spur a surge in orders
for new container ships during the first five months of this year, according to
industry group BIMCO.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-27/shipping-container-rates-top-10-000-from-asia-to-europe
World Faces Longer Supply
Shortage as China’s Factories Squeezed Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:20 AM
Eric Li’s factory making glass
lampshades for companies including Home Depot Inc. is being stretched to its
limits with sales doubling their pre-pandemic level.
But like many Chinese manufacturers,
he doesn’t plan to expand operations -- a reticence that could slow the pace of
China’s economic growth this year and prolong a shortage of goods being felt
around the world as demand picks up.
Surging prices of raw materials
means “margins are compressed,” explains Li, owner of Huizhou Baizhan Glass Co.
Ltd., in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, which makes about $30
million in annual revenue. With the global economic recovery still uneven, “the
future is very unclear, so there is not much push to expand capacity,” he adds.
The combination of higher input
prices, uncertainty about export prospects and a weak recovery in domestic
consumer demand meant Chinese manufacturing investment from January to April
was 0.4% below the same period in 2019, according to official statistics
(comparing to 2019 strips out the distortion of last year’s pandemic data).
Due to the vast size of China’s
manufacturing sector, that poses a risk both to the nation’s growth -- which is
currently predicted to reach 8.5% in 2021, according to a Bloomberg tally of
economists’ estimates -- and to a global economy that’s grappling with supply
shortages and rising prices.
More
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-faces-longer-supply-shortage-002059342.html
One McDonald's is so desperate
for workers it is giving away iPhones By FOX 5 NY Staff Published
A McDonald’s restaurant in Illinois
is offering iPhones to try to attract new workers.
A viral tweet shows the red and yellow
poster outside the store.
The photo, captured by @Brogawd_,
was shared Sunday evening.
"McDonald’s Now Hiring,"
the sign reads. "Free iPhone."
The sign did not forget to include fine
print that says: "After 6 months employment & meet employment
criteria."
The sign is at a McDonald's in
Altamont , Illinois.
The global fast-food chain is competing with other
restaurants that are hiring nationwide. Another McDonald's
in Florida offered $50 to people just to show up for a job interview.
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/a-mcdonalds-is-so-desperate-for-workers-it-is-giving-away-iphones
Service sector optimism grows at
fastest rate on record Thursday 27 May 2021
12:01 am
Optimism over the future of the service sector increased at
the fastest pace on record in the three months to May as the UK’s economic
recovery from the pandemic gathered steam.
According to the CBI’s latest quarterly Service Sector
Survey, sentiment about the general outlook for the professional services
sub-sector jumped from +23 per cent to +63 per cent, a record leap.
Meanwhile, buoyed by the reopening of non-essential retail
and hospitality, the consumer services sector saw optimism jump from -55 per
cent to +33 per cent.
The picture was more mixed for volumes, with business and
professional services volumes rising at the fastest rate on record last
quarter, while consumer services volumes continued to decline but at a much
slower pace.
But both sub-sectors expect strong growth in volumes in the
quarter ahead.
The CBI’s data comes after IHS Markit’s flash PMI reading
for May suggested that business activity in the UK expanded at its fastest rate
since 1998 this month.
Driven by the government’s rapid progress with the
vaccination scheme, ministers have been able to peel back restriction layer by
layer, allowing business activity to take off.
The service sector is at the core of the UK’s economy,
accounting for 81 per cent of total UK economic output in 2020.
More
https://www.cityam.com/service-sector-optimism-grows-at-fastest-rate-on-record/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Midday+newsletter+Nov+2020
What people today call inflation is not inflation, i.e., the
increase in the quantity of money and money substitutes, but the general rise
in commodity prices and wage rates which is the inevitable consequence of
inflation.
Ludwig von Mises
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
German scientists say they can
help improve vaccines to prevent blood clots AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson jabs have caused rare
blood clots but scientists say they can be redesigned to avoid problem
Wed 26 May 2021 22.37 BST
A team of German scientists believe that they have worked
out why some
people given the AstraZeneca and Johnson
& Johnson vaccines against Covid-19 develop blood clots – and claim
they can tell the manufacturers how to improve the vaccine to avoid it.
The key is in the adenovirus – the common cold virus that
is used to deliver the spike protein of the coronavirus into the body, say Rolf
Marschalek, a professor at Goethe university in Frankfurt, and colleagues. The
mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna do not use this delivery
system and there have been no blood clotting cases linked to them.
The blood clots are rare but troubling in the younger age
group who are more at risk of clotting and less likely to experience severe
Covid illness. The UK is now offering anyone under the age of 40 a choice of
vaccines, where available. There have been 309 cases in the UK out of 33
million people given the AstraZeneca
vaccine.
The scientists in a pre-print
which has not undergone peer review say they believe the problem lies in the
entry of the adenovirus into the nucleus of the cell rather than the just the
cellular fluid, where the virus normally makes proteins.
“The adenovirus life cycle includes the infection of cells
… entry of the adenoviral DNA into the nucleus, and subsequently gene
transcription by the host transcription machinery,” they write.
“And exactly here lies the problem: the viral piece of DNA
… is not optimised to be transcribed inside of the nucleus.”
Inside the cell nucleus, parts of the spike protein splice
or split apart. These become mutant protein pieces which float off into the
body and can very rarely trigger blood clots, the scientists believe.
Prof Marschalek says the vaccines can be redesigned to
avoid the problem. J&J is already in contact with him, he told the
Financial Times.
They had not yet talked to AstraZeneca however, he said.
The company had not been in touch, “but if they do I can tell them what to do
to make a better vaccine,” he told the FT.
However, other scientists have other theories and
Marschalek’s explanation of the adverse events is still a hypothesis, which is
yet to be scrutinised by other experts.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/german-scientists-say-they-can-help-improve-vaccines-to-prevent-blood-clots
Taiwan struggles with testing
backlog amid largest outbreak By HUIZHONG
WU May 27, 2021
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Facing Taiwan’s largest
outbreak of the pandemic and looking for rapid virus test kits, the mayor of
the island’s capital did what anyone might do: He Googled it.
“If you don’t know, and you try to know something,
please check Google,” Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je quipped.
Praised for its success at keeping the virus
away for more than a year, Taiwan had until May recorded just 1,128 cases and
12 deaths. But the number of locally transmitted cases started growing this
month and it soon became clear that the central government was ill prepared not
only to contain the virus, but to even detect it on a large scale due to a lack
of investment in rapid testing.
That left officials like Ko scrambling to catch
up as the number of new infections climbed to some 300 a day. Ko’s search put
him in contact with six local companies who make rapid tests and his government
was soon able to set up four rapid testing sites in a district that had emerged
as a virus hotspot.
Rapid tests, experts say, are a critical tool
in catching the virus in its early days. The alternative that Taiwan has been
relying on — tests that have to be sent out to a lab for processing — has led
to backlogs that may be obscuring the true extent of the outbreak.
“You want to identify those infected cases as
soon as possible,” to contain the spread, said Ruby Huang, a professor in the
medical college at National Taiwan University. “And then you’re basically
running against time.”
With so few cases, Taiwan had been a bubble of
normalcy for most of the pandemic. Schools stayed open, people went to bars and
restaurants, and the island’s economy was among the few globally that saw
positive growth.
Its success was built largely on strict border
controls that primarily allowed in only citizens and long-term residents, who
then faced mandatory two-week quarantines.
From time to time it found small clusters of
infections and stamped them out through contact tracing and quarantines. Last
month authorities found a cluster involving pilots from the state-owned China
Airlines.
Stopping the virus this time would prove
difficult, in part because under government policy pilots were only required to
quarantine for three-days and did not need a negative test to get out of
quarantine. Soon employees at a quarantine hotel where China Airlines flight
crew stayed started getting sick — and so did their family members.
The virus had escaped quarantine and was
spreading locally, mostly in Taipei and surrounding areas.
More
https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-coronavirus-pandemic-business-health-c12fc8276820e18751d85e52dcdba882
“I Don’t Know of a Bigger Story
in the World” Right Now Than Ivermectin: NY Times Best-Selling Author Posted on May
25, 2021 by Nick Corbishley
So why are journalists not covering it?
Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has
just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The 15-page
article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on
all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as
the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to
thwart them.
Because of ivermectin, Capuzzo says, there are “hundreds of
thousands, actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in
India to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.” Yet media outlets have
done all they can to “debunk” the notion that ivermectin may serve as an
effective, easily accessible and affordable treatment for Covid-19. They have
parroted the arguments laid out by health regulators around the world that
there just isn’t enough evidence to justify its use.
For his part, Capuzzo, as a reporter, “saw with [his] own
eyes the other side [of the story]” that has gone unreported, of the many
patients in the US whose lives have been saved by ivermectin and of five of the
doctors that have led the battle to save lives around the world, Paul Marik,
Umberto Meduri, José Iglesias, Pierre Kory and Joe Varon. These are all highly
decorated doctors. Through their leadership of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical
Care (FLCCC) Alliance, they have already enhanced our treatment of Covid-19 by
discovering and promoting the use of Corticoid steroids against the virus. But
their calls for ivermectin to also be used have met with a wall of resistance
from healthcare regulators and a wall of silence from media outlets.
“I really wish the world could see both sides,” Capuzzo
laments. But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the
other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably
refuse to publish it.
That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated
journalist best known for his New York Times -bestselling nonfiction
books Close to Shore and Murder Room , ended up publishing his
article on ivermectin in Mountain Home
As Capuzzo himself says, “I don’t know of a bigger story in
the world.”
More
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/i-dont-know-of-a-bigger-story-in-the-world-right-now-than-ivermectin-ny-times-best-selling-author.html
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.
Superflimsy graphene turned
ultrastiff by optical forging Stiffened
graphene opens up avenues for novel applications Date: May 25, 2021
Source: University of Jyväskylä - Jyväskylän
yliopisto
Summary: Graphene is an ultrathin material
characterized by its ultrasmall bending modulus, superflimsiness. Now
researchers have demonstrated how an experimental technique called optical forging
can make graphene ultrastiff, increase its stiffness by several orders of
magnitude.
Graphene is an ultrathin material
characterized by its ultrasmall bending modulus, superflimsiness. Now the
researchers at the Nanoscience Center of the University of Jyväskylä have
demonstrated how an experimental technique called optical forging can make
graphene ultrastiff, increase its stiffness by several orders of magnitude. The
research was published in npj 2D Materials and Applications in May 2021.
Graphene is an atomically thin
carbon material loaded with excellent properties, such as large charge carrier
mobility, superb thermal conductivity, and high optical transparency. Its
impermeability and tensile strength that is 200 times that of steel make it suitable
for nanomechanical applications. Unfortunately, its exceptional flimsiness
makes any three-dimensional structures notoriously unstable and difficult to
fabricate.
These difficulties may now be over,
as a research group at the Nanoscience Center of the University of Jyväskylä
has demonstrated how to make graphene ultrastiff using a specifically developed
laser treatment. This stiffening opens up whole new application areas for this
wonder material.
The same group has previously
prepared three-dimensional graphene structures using a pulsed femtosecond laser
patterning method called optical forging. The laser irradiation causes defects
in the graphene lattice, which in turn expands the lattice, causing stable
three-dimensional structures. Here the group used optical forging to modify a
monolayer graphene membrane suspended like a drum skin and measured its
mechanical properties using nanoindentation.
The measurements revealed that the
bending stiffness of graphene increased up to five orders of magnitude compared
to pristine graphene, which is a new world record.
---- Stiffened graphene opens up avenues for novel
applications, such as fabrication of microelectromechanical scaffold structures
or manipulating mechanical resonance frequency of graphene membrane resonators
up to the GHz regime. With graphene being light, strong and impermeable, one potential
is to use optical forging on graphene flakes to make micrometer-scale cage
structures for intravenous drug transport.
"The optical forging method is
particularly powerful because it allows direct writing of stiffened graphene
features precisely at the locations where you want them," says Professor
Mika Pettersson, who oversees the development of the new technique, and
continues, "Our next step will be to stretch our imagination, play around
with optical forging, and see what graphene devices we can make."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210525113704.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
Another weekend
and the race to swap devaluing fiat currency into goods and assets with
intrinsic value begins. By the time central banksters are issuing Central Bankster
Digital Currency, I suspect our existing fiat currencies and government bonds
and bills will have very little purchasing power left beyond that enforced by
the goons of the state. We are living in
very dangerous times.
Have a great
[long] weekend everyone.
“Lenin was certainly right. There is no
subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to
debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law
on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a
million is able to diagnose.”
John
Maynard Keynes.
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