Baltic Dry Index. 3053 +46 Brent Crude 67.25
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Why a four-year-old child could understand this [Covid-19] report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it.
Prime Minister Johnson, with apologies to Groucho Marx.
Stimulus checks boost U.S. consumer spending; inflation warming up
April 30, 20218:24 PM BST Reuter sLucia Mutikani
U.S. consumer spending rebounded in March amid a surge in income as households received additional COVID-19 pandemic relief money from the government, building a strong foundation for a further acceleration in consumption in the second quarter.
Other data on Friday showed labor costs jumped by the most in 14 years in the first quarter, driven by a pick-up in wage growth as companies competed for workers to boost production. The White House's massive $1.9 trillion fiscal stimulus and rapidly improving public health are unleashing pent-up demand.
"While we aren't completely out of the woods yet, today's report shows the beginning of an economic rebound," said Brendan Coughlin, head of consumer banking at Citizens in Boston. "Assuming no setback in the continued rollout of the vaccines, U.S. consumers are well-positioned in the second half of the year to stimulate strong economic growth across the country."
Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, increased 4.2% last month after falling 1.0% in February, the Commerce Department said. The increase was broadly in line with economists' expectations.
The data was included in Thursday's gross domestic product report for the first quarter, which showed growth shooting up at a 6.4% annualized rate in the first three months of the year after rising at a 4.3% pace in the fourth quarter. Consumer spending powered ahead at a 10.7% rate last quarter.
Most Americans in the middle- and low-income brackets received one-time $1,400 stimulus checks last month which were part of the pandemic rescue package approved in March. That boosted personal income 21.1% after a drop of 7.0% in February.
A chunk of the cash was stashed away, with the saving rate soaring to 27.6% from 13.9% in February. Households have amassed at least $2.2 trillion in excess savings, which could provide a powerful tailwind for consumer spending this year and beyond.
The government's generosity and expansion of the COVID-19 vaccination program to include all American adults is lifting consumer spirits, with a measure of household sentiment rising to a 13-month high in April.
Wages are also increasing, which should to help to underpin spending when stimulus boost fades.
In a separate report on Friday, the Labor Department said its Employment Cost Index, the broadest measure of labor costs, jumped 0.9% in the first quarter. That was the largest rise since the second quarter of 2007.
The ECI is widely viewed by policymakers and economists as one of the better measures of labor market slack and a predictor of core inflation as it adjusts for composition and job quality changes. Last quarter's increase was driven by a 1.0% rise in wages, also the biggest gain in 14 years.
Wages in the accommodation and food services industry, hardest hit by the pandemic, soared 1.7%.
Despite employment being 8.4 million jobs below its peak in February 2020, businesses are struggling to find qualified workers as they rush to meet the robust domestic demand.
INFLATION RISING
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday acknowledged the worker shortage saying "one big factor would be schools aren't open yet, so there's still people who are at home taking care of their children, and would like to be back in the workforce, but can't be yet."
Economists agree and expect the rising wages to contribute to higher inflation this year.
The strengthening demand and the dropping of last year's weak readings from the calculation lifted inflation last month.
The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index excluding the volatile food and energy component increased 0.4% after edging up 0.1% in February. In the 12 months through March, the so-called core PCE price index increased 1.8%, the most since February 2020.
----"Stronger labor cost growth even before the economy hits full employment is a reason to think that even after the reopening-fueled pop this year, inflation is likely to settle above the anemic rate of the past cycle."
Households last month spent more on motor vehicles and recreational. They also visited restaurants.
When adjusted for inflation, consumer spending rebounded 3.6% last month after falling 1.2% in February. The rebound in the so-called real consumer spending sets consumption on a higher growth trajectory heading into the second quarter.
Most economists expect double-digit growth this quarter, which would position the economy to achieve growth of at least 7%, which would be the fastest since 1984. The economy contracted 3.5% in 2020, its worst performance in 74 years.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-consumer-spending-income-rebound-march-2021-04-30/
There’s Plenty Worrying Investors as Europe’s Stocks Hit Records
By Kit Rees and Macarena Munoz Montijano
· European stocks have rallied in 2021 on recovery optimism
Barclays boss predicts biggest economic boom since 1948
30 April, 2021 By Simon Jack Business editor
The UK is about to experience its biggest economic boom since the aftermath of World War Two, according to Barclays boss Jes Staley.
His upbeat assessment came as Barclays revealed its profits for the first three months of this year had more than doubled from a year earlier to £2.4bn.
"We estimate the UK economy will grow at its fastest rate since 1948. That's pretty spectacular," he said.
The vaccine programme and built-up savings will help to drive the rebound.
Mr Staley said that a combination of the successful vaccine rollout and Barclays' estimate of an extra £200bn sitting in customer and company bank accounts meant the UK would join the US in seeing some of the fastest economic growth in decades.
The boost in Barclays' latest profits was almost entirely driven by a more confident view on how many of its loans would be repaid.
This time last year, the bank set aside more than £2bn to cover the risks that borrowers would be unable to repay all of their debts. This time round they are setting aside just £55m.
Kissinger warns of 'colossal' dangers in US-China tensions
Issued on:
Acclaimed diplomat Henry Kissinger said Friday that US-China tensions threaten to engulf the entire world and could lead to an Armageddon-like clash between the two military and technology giants.
The 97-year-old former US secretary of state, who as an advisor to president Richard Nixon crafted the 1971 unfreezing of relations between Washington and Beijing, said the mix of economic, military and technological strengths of the two superpowers carried more risks than the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Strains with China are "the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world," Kissinger told the McCain Institute's Sedona Forum on global issues.
"Because if we can't solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States."
While nuclear weapons were already large enough to damage the entire globe during the Cold War, he said advances in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence -- where China and the United States are both leaders -- have multiplied the doomsday threat.
"For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time," Kissinger said.
----The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union during the decades after World War II was more one-dimensional, focused on nuclear weapons competition, said Kissinger, one of the leading strategic thinkers of the past six decades.
"The Soviet Union had no economic capacity. They had military technological capacity," he said.
"(They) didn't have developmental technological capacity as China does. China is a huge economic power in addition to being a significant military power."
More
Eurozone GDP contracts as it slips into double-dip recession territory
Friday 30 April 2021 10:41 am
The Eurozone economy shrank by 0.6 per cent in the first three months of the year as it slid back into recession following persistent Covid lockdowns.
The European Union’s statistics office Eurostat said GDP in the 19 countries sharing the euro contracted by 1.8 per cent year-on-year.
This put the single currency area in a technical recession after a 0.7 per cent quarterly GDP fall in the last quarter of 2020.
The contraction was softer than expected, with economists predicting an 0.8 per cent quarterly decline and a two per cent annual fall.
The Eurozone’s slide was mainly caused by a 1.7 per cent slump in its biggest economy Germany, though mitigated by growth in France.
Separately, eurozone consumer prices rose 0.6 per cent month-on-month in April, signalling a 1.6 per cent yearly gain.
The rise was buoyed by a 10.3 per cent year-on-year surge in energy prices, which offset a fall in the costs of unprocessed food.
Eurostat also said that eurozone unemployment fell in March to 8.1 per cent of the workforce, which represents more than 13 million people.
https://www.cityam.com/eurozone-gdp-contracts-as-double-dip-recession-looms/
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed former Luxembourg P.M., serial liar, ex-president of the European Commission. Scotch connoisseur.
Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
UK house prices grow at fastest pace in more than 15 years in April
Friday 30 April 2021 8:25 am
UK house prices grew at the fastest pace in more than 15 years this month, according to the latest research.
The average house price was up 2.1 per cent month-on-month, the biggest monthly rise since February 2014.
Annual house price growth rebounded to 7.1 per cent in April compared to 5.7 per cent in March, pushing property values to a new record high of £238,831.
House prices have jumped by £15,916 over the past 12 months, according to the latest Nationwide data.
Nationwide chief economist Robert Gardner said: “Just as expectations of the end of the stamp duty holiday led to a slowdown in house price growth in March, so the extension of the stamp duty holiday in the Budget prompted a reacceleration in April.
“However, our research suggests that while the stamp duty holiday is impacting the timing of housing transactions, for most people it is not the key motivating factor prompting them to move in the first place.”
“Frenzy territory”
Lucy Pendleton, property expert at estate agents James Pendleton, said: “This market is on the boil. Rarely does a new record high leave such clear water between it and the previous peak. Last month’s average house price of just over £232,000 was itself a record and April’s new high of nearly £239,000 tells you just how buoyant things are at the moment. That’s a staggering jump of more than £6,000.
“In London, the market is starting to enter frenzy territory. We haven’t seen this much anxiety in buyers’ eyes for years. They’re losing out left and right to cash buyers bidding over asking price. Pictures this month of people camping outside an estate agent overnight sums up the general picture.
“Prices have run away and vendors feel they’re now able to test the water with valuations that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago.
More
https://www.cityam.com/uk-house-prices-grow-at-fastest-pace-in-more-than-15-years-in-april/
Sawmills Are Selling Boards Faster Than They Can Cut Them
Marcy Nicholson April 29, 2021
Lumber demand is so strong that Resolute Forest Products Inc.’s order book exceeds its inventory, according to Chief Executive Officer Remi Lalonde.
After trucking and railcar shortages hampered shipments during the first quarter, Resolute is now holding extra inventories at a time of record wood prices, Lalonde said during a conference call Thursday. Still, even those stockpiles aren’t enough to satisfy the North American building boom, so Resolute is ramping up output. Full-year production is expected to rise by 7%.
Lumber futures have surged 85% this year amid sky-high demand from homebuilders and remodelers. The price touched an all-time high of $1,334.60 per thousand board feet two days ago and on Thursday surged by the $32 maximum allowed under Chicago Mercantile Exchange rules.
“We’re selling volume that we haven’t sawed yet,” the CEO said. The inventory buildup during a price rally was “kind of a happy accident.”
Idle Sawmills
Investors punished Resolute for posting adjusted per-share profit that trailed every analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg. Executives cited the transportation snags for the underperformance. The stock plunged as much as 17%.
To boost output, Resolute restarted a mill in Ontario that had been idle for two years, as well as one in Arkansas. Before Thursday, Resolute shares had more than doubled in a year, pushing the company’s market valuation to more than $1 billion.
More
If you've heard this [inflation] story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
Fed Chairman Powell, with apologies to Groucho Marx.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
‘Escape mutation’ in Covid strain discovered in Angola able to evade Coronavirus antibodies
Thursday 29 April 2021 7:11 pm
A relatively unknown Covid-19 variant that was first discovered on a flight from Tanzania to Angola is now considered the world’s most mutated Coronavirus strain.
The variant carries around 34 mutations, including a so-called ‘escape mutation’ according to findings that were shared in a pre-print research report and reported on by various media.
The ‘escape mutation’, or E484K change, enables the variant to evade or resist antibodies, meaning that people who have had Covid in the past could become sick again.
Less stable than presumed
The strain was first discovered after three passengers who travelled on a plane from Tanzania to Angola tested positive in February.
According to professor William Haseltine, who worked for years at Harvard University, the variant is “cause for concern” because of the relatively high number of mutations.
More interestingly, he pointed in The Sun that the new mutation did not originate on the B1 strain, where, so far, all other variants had derived from.
“These mutations could increase the concentration of the virus in infected people, which may help prolong the infection and increase transmissibility,” Haseltine reportedly said.
“The [Angolan] variant demonstrates the enormous versatility of this virus,” he added. “Originally, many expected this virus to be relatively stable but it is showing to us with this variant and others, that this is not actually the case.”
More
India cases up as scientists appeal to Modi to release data
NEW DELHI (AP) — Indian scientists appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to publicly release virus data that would allow them to save lives as coronavirus cases climbed again Friday, prompting the army to open its hospitals in a desperate bid to control a massive humanitarian crisis.
With 386,452 new cases, India now has reported more than 18.7 million since the pandemic began, second only to the United States. The Health Ministry on Friday also reported 3,498 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 208,330. Experts believe both figures are an undercount, but it’s unclear by how much.
India’s pandemic response has been marred by insufficient data and the online appeal — signed by over 350 scientists Friday afternoon — asks government to release data about the sequencing of virus variants, testing, recovered patients and how people were responding to vaccines.
The appeal says that “granular” data on testing was inaccessible to non-government experts and some government experts too. Modeling work to predict future surges was being done by government-appointed experts with insufficient information. Similarly, scientists had failed to get information that would allow them predict how many beds, oxygen or intensive care facilities would be needed, it said.
The appeal urged the government to widen the number of organizations sequencing the virus to study its evolution, and also increase the number of samples being studied. It added that restrictions on importing scientific raw materials — to make India ‘self reliant’ is a key goal for Modi and his government — was an obstacle.
----India has set a daily global record for more than a week with an average of nearly 350,000 infections. Daily deaths have nearly tripled in the past three weeks, reflecting the intensity of the latest surge.
In the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, a school teachers’ organization said that more than 550 members have died after they were infected with COVID-19 while helping conduct local council elections this month, the Times of India newspaper reported.
---- On Thursday, millions voted in state elections in West Bengal with little or no regard to social distancing.
In the southern state of Karnataka, Revenue Minister R. Ashoka said nearly 2,000 coronavirus patients under home care have switched off their phones and cannot be traced. Police were trying to track them as they might be seeking hospitalization on their own, he said.
In central Madhya Pradesh state, three villages in Balaghat district have pooled money to convert buildings into COVID-19 care centers. They have purchased oxygen concentrators and started admitting patients. Government doctors are visiting the facilities twice a day.
More
U.S. restricts travel to India amid COVID-19 case surge
April 30, 2021 / 4:48 PM
April 30 (UPI) -- The Biden administration plans to halt travel from India amid skyrocketing COVID-19 cases in the South Asian country, the White House press secretary announced Friday.
The new restriction will go into effect Tuesday.
"On the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the administration will restrict travel from India starting immediately," Jen Psaki told reporters in a statement. "The policy will be implemented in light of extraordinarily high COVID-19 caseloads and multiple variants circulating in the India. The policy will take effect on Tuesday, May 4."
The announcement came on the same day India reported the largest single-day number of cases -- more than 386,000 on Thursday, according to the Johns Hopkins University global tracker. The country also reported nearly 3,500 deaths Thursday.
More
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/04/30/India-travel-ban-COVID-19/9001619811913/
Next, some very useful 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
FDA information. https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some more useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
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. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
A path to graphene topological qubits
Date: April 28, 2021
Source: Aalto University
Summary: Researchers demonstrate that magnetism and superconductivity can coexist in graphene, opening a pathway towards graphene-based topological qubits.
In the quantum realm, electrons can group together to behave in interesting ways. Magnetism is one of these behaviors that we see in our day-to-day life, as is the rarer phenomena of superconductivity. Intriguingly, these two behaviors are often antagonists, meaning that the existence of one of them often destroys the other. However, if these two opposite quantum states are forced to coexist artificially, an elusive state called a topological superconductor appears, which is exciting for researchers trying to make topological qubits.
Topological qubits are exciting as one of the potential technologies for future quantum computers. In particular, topological qubits provide the basis for topological quantum computing, which is attractive because it is much less sensitive to interference from its surroundings from perturbing the measurements. However, designing and controlling topological qubits has remained a critically open problem, ultimately due to the difficulty of finding materials capable of hosting these states, such as topological superconductors.
---- In a recent breakthrough experiment, researchers at the UAM in Spain, CNRS in France, and INL in Portugal, together with the theoretical support of Prof. Jose Lado at Aalto University, have demonstrated an initial step along a pathway towards topological qubits in graphene. The researchers demonstrated that single layers of graphene can host simultaneous magnetism and superconductivity, by measuring quantum excitations unique to this interplay. This breakthrough finding was accomplished by combining the magnetism of crystal domains in graphene, and the superconductivity of deposited metallic islands.
---- The demonstration of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states in graphene is the first step towards the ultimate development of graphene-based topological qubits. In particular, by carefully controlling Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states, topological superconductivity and Majorana states can be created. Topological qubits based on Majorana states can potentially drastically overcome the limitations of current qubits, protecting quantum information by exploiting the nature of these unconventional states. The emergence of these states requires meticulous control of the system parameters. The current experiment establishes the critical starting point towards this goal, which can be built upon to hopefully open a disruptive road to carbon-based topological quantum computers.
I'm leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it's not raining.
Groucho Marx
This weekend’s musical diversion. Albinoni, the oboe king. 10 minutes.
Tomaso Albinoni - Concerto for two oboes in C major, op. 9, No. 9 - The King's Consort
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzI-CXNKNwY
This weekend’s science masterclass. Approx. 10 minutes.
Particle Physics Discoveries that Disappeared
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGggYZTK1ik
This weekend’s maths masterclass. Approx. 34 minutes. Fair warning, for maths geniuses only. But interesting!
Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
The Fed, with apologies to Groucho Marx
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