SINGAPORE, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Asian shares suffered
heavy losses early on Tuesday following a broad sell-off on Wall Street, as
markets fretted about the impact of multi-year high oil prices at a time when
supply chain disruptions are already putting pressure on economic activity.
"Investors are clearly
worried about inflation due to supply chain disruptions and the rally in energy
prices," said Vasu Menon, executive director of investment strategy at
OCBC Bank.
The drop in markets took MSCI's
main benchmark to 619.87, the lowest since November 2020. It has shed more than
5% this year, with Hong Kong and Japanese markets among the big losers.
"We have seen tech stocks
outperform value stocks, so if inflation remains a worry, then tech stocks tend
to get hit," Menon said.
Oil prices reached three-year
peak on Monday after OPEC+ confirmed it would stick to its current output policy as demand for petroleum products
rebounds, despite pressure from some countries for a bigger boost to
production.
U.S. oil was steady at $77.60 a
barrel, a day after hitting its highest since 2014. Brent crude stood at $81.30
after rising to a three-year top.
U.S. Treasury yields rose on
investor caution about the need to raise the government's debt ceiling as the
United States faces the risk of a historic default in two weeks. read
more
October
5, 2021
4:41 AM
By Reuters Staff
NEW YORK, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Chinese
homebuilder Fantasia Holdings’ dollar-denominated bonds lost nearly half their
market value in a massive Monday selloff, after it said it had failed to make a
$206 million international market debt payment on time.
The firm’s July 2022 and October
2022 issues both tumbled nearly 16 cents to 19.5 cents on the dollar each
Refinitiv data showed.
In a statement, the property
developer said it will assess the potential impact of the non-payment on the
group’s financial conditions.
On September 20, Fantasia had issued
a statement that it had sufficient working capital and no liquidity issues.
(Reporting by Tom Arnold and Rodrigo Campos; editing by Marc Jones & Shri
Navaratnam)
https://www.reuters.com/article/china-property-fantasia-bonds/update-1-china-homebuilder-fantasias-bonds-tumble-as-it-misses-payment-deadline-idUSL8N2R109E
Stock futures muted after a
tech-driven sell-off on Wall Street Published
Mon, Oct 4 2021 6:03 PM EDT
Stock futures were muted in
overnight trading on Monday following a tech-led sell-off as investors
continued to dump high-flying shares in the face of rising rates.
Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial
Average slipped 30 points. S&P 500 futures were little changed while Nasdaq
100 futures traded in mildly positive territory.
On Monday, the Nasdaq Composite
dropped 2.1% for its sixth negative day in seven as tech heavyweights Apple,
Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft all fell at least 2%. Shares of Facebook slipped
4.9%. The blue-chip Dow shed more than 300 points, while the S&P 500 lost
1.3%.
“Investors have grown increasingly uneasy as accelerating
economic activity and monetary stimulus give way to slowing growth and steps
toward policy normalization,” said Seema Shah, Principal Global Investors’
chief strategist.
A recent jump in bond yields caused investors to flee
highly valued tech stocks as higher rates make their future profits less
attractive. The 10-year
Treasury yield traded slightly up at 1.48% on Monday after hitting a
high of 1.56% last week.
The market suffered a tumultuous September as inflation
fears, slowing growth and rising rates kept investors on edge. The S&P 500 fell 4.8% last
month, posting its worst month since March 2020 and breaking a seven-month
winning streak. The equity benchmark is now 5.4% off its all-time high reached
in early September, but has still gained 14.5% year to date.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html
Facebook blames "faulty
configuration change" for nearly six-hour outage October
4, 2021
5:06 PM
(Reuters)
-Facebook Inc blamed a “faulty configuration change” for a nearly six-hour outage
on Monday that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its
social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
The company in a late Monday blog post here
did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was
planned.
Several Facebook employees who declined to
be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused
by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.
The failures of internal communication tools
and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work
compounded the error, the employees said. Security experts have said an
inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/facebook-outages/update-13-facebook-blames-faulty-configuration-change-for-nearly-six-hour-outage-idUSL1N2R02UV
In other news, where the GB boldly goes the rest of
Europe follows, or something like that.
After causing
chaos in the UK, truck driver shortages could soon hit the rest of Europe Published Mon, Oct 4 2021 6:50 AM EDT
LONDON -- The truck driver shortage plaguing the U.K. is
not just a British problem, experts say, with the wider Continent also facing a
shortfall and potential supply chain problems.
There was more than a whiff of “schadenfreude” (or
enjoyment from the woes of others) in mainland Europe last week as
the U.K. faced a petrol crisis. There were long lines of cars outside
British gasoline stations and even fights on forecourts as panic buying spread
across the country amid a shortage of truck drivers able to deliver fuel.
Brexit was named as one of the key reasons for the shortage
of heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers, although problems in the industry go
deeper and are found across Europe, industry experts noted. A survey of 616
industry figures in June by the Road Haulage Association in the U.K. found that
retirement, changing working rules, the Covid pandemic , low pay and drivers
leaving the industry were among the reasons for the lack of operators.
The association, which has been warning of a driver
shortage for months, says the U.K.’s HGV driver shortfall stands at 100,000
currently; pre-pandemic, there was an estimated shortage in excess of 60,000
drivers.
Elsewhere, supply chain issues came to the fore in Britain
during the pandemic, with truckers unable to enter or exit the country easily,
causing long queues at ports and borders and leading to some shortages of food
and medicines.
----The average salary for a truck driver in the U.K.
is around £30,000 ($40,600), while in Germany, pay is around 41,000 euros
(around $47,500), according to Salary Expert , although it can be much higher
(or lower) depending on experience and can also vary by region, transport experts note .
Shortages
across Europe The U.K. is not alone when it comes to driver shortages,
however, and experts warn that parts of Continental Europe could also face
their own trucker shortfalls soon enough.
“We’re not in as dramatic and desperate situation yet, but it
might come,” Frank Huster, director general at the Federal Association for
Freight Forwarding and Logistics Germany, told CNBC on Thursday.
He noted that while Brexit has “certainly had an impact” on
the U.K., the wider European haulage sector faced a long-standing problem with
a lack of workers.
“The logistics sector lacks qualified personnel such as
lorry drivers but also trained locomotive drivers, inland navigation workers,
terminal workers, as well as management people. ... We have less and less people
to work in Western markets,” he added.
Analysis
company Transport Intelligence published research in August looking at “European
Driver Shortages” in which it assessed the severity of the
shortfalls in various European countries, a problem it said had been growing
over recent years. It estimated that across Europe the total shortfall of
drivers now surpasses 400,000, with the most heavily impacted European
countries being Poland, the U.K. and Germany.
John
Manners-Bell, CEO of Transport Intelligence and an expert on global supply
chains and logistics, said
that the industry has been warning governments of shortages for many years .
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/truck-driver-hgv-shortage-in-uk-could-soon-hit-the-rest-of-europe.html
"We
finished the year, and we reported that we had $17 billion of cash sitting at
the bank's parent company as a liquidity cushion. As the year has gone on, that
liquidity cushion has been virtually unchanged."
Alan Schwartz, CEO Bear Stearns, March 12, 2008.
Bust March 16, 2008.
Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our
spendthrift politicians, inflation now
needs an entire section of its own.
Market is unprepared for the
inflation fallout, Wharton’s Jeremy Siegel warns Published Sun, Oct 3 2021 5:00 PM EDT
Updated Sun, Oct 3 2021 7:52 PM EDT
Wall Street may be on the verge of an uncharacteristically
painful quarter.
Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel, who’s known for
his positive market forecasts, is sounding the alarm on the market’s ability to
cope with inflation.
“We’re headed for some trouble ahead,” he told CNBC’s “Trading Nation ” on Friday.
“Inflation, in general, is going to be a much bigger problem than the Fed
believes.”
Siegel warns there are serious risks tied to rising prices.
“There’s going to be pressure on the Fed to accelerate its
taper process,’” he said. “I do not believe that the market is prepared for an
accelerated taper.”
His cautious shift is a clear departure from his
bullishness in early January. On
Jan. 4 on “Trading Nation, ” he correctly predicted the Dow would hit 35,000 in 2021, a 14%
jump from the year’s first market open. The index hit an all-time high of
35,631.19 on August 16. On Friday, it closed at 34,326.46.
According to Siegel, the biggest threat facing Wall Street
is Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell stepping away from easy money policies
much sooner than expected due to surging inflation.
“We all know that a lot of the levity of the equity market
is related to the liquidity that the Fed has provided. If that’s going to be
taken away faster, that also means that interest rate hikes are going to occur
sooner,” he noted. “Both those things are not positives for the equity market.”
Siegel is particularly concerned about the impact on growth
stocks, particularly technology .
He suggests the tech-heavy Nasdaq ,
which is 5% away from its record high, is set up for sharp losses.
“There will be a challenge for the long duration stocks,”
said Siegel. “The tilt will be towards the value stocks.”
He sees the backdrop boding well for companies benefitting
from rising rates, have pricing power and deliver dividends.
“Yield is scarce and you
don’t want to lock yourself into to long-term government bonds which I
think are going to suffer quite a dramatically over the next six months,” he
said.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/03/market-is-unprepared-for-inflation-fallout-whartons-jeremy-siegel.html
Christmas at Risk
as Supply Chain ‘Disaster’ Only Gets Worse Stock prices of retailers are near all-time highs.
Global trade is a mess, and peak shipping has just begun.
4 October 2021, 05:00 BST
It’s the beginning of October, just the start of what the
retail world simply calls “peak.” But the industry is already in various forms
of panic that usually don’t take hold until the weeks before Christmas.
Early in the year, the hope was that the bottlenecks that
gummed up the global supply chain in 2020 would be mostly cleared by now.
They’ve actually only gotten worse — much
worse — and evidence is mounting that the holiday season is at risk.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-04/out-of-stock-shortages-for-christmas-shopping-put-retailers-at-risk?cmpid=BBD100421_TRADE&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=211004&utm_campaign=trade
Inside
America’s Broken Supply Chain
How industry failures to
collaborate and share information left the system vulnerable
October 2, 2021
The commercial pipeline that each
year brings $1 trillion worth of toys, clothing, electronics and furniture from
Asia to the United States is clogged and no one knows how to unclog it.
This month, the median cost of
shipping a standard rectangular metal container from China to the West Coast of
the United States hit a record $20,586, almost twice what it cost in July,
which was twice what it cost in January, according to the Freightos index.
Essential freight-handling equipment too often is not where it’s needed, and
when it is, there aren’t enough truckers or warehouse workers to operate it.
As Americans fume, supply headaches
that were viewed as temporary when the coronavirus pandemic began now are
expected to last through 2022.
Dozens of cargo vessels stuck at
anchor off the California coast illustrate the delivery disruptions that have
become the signature feature of the recovery, fueling inflation, sapping growth
and calling into question the global economic model that has prevailed for
three decades.
Today’s twisted supply chain is forcing
companies to place precautionary orders to avoid running out of goods, which
only compounds the pressure. Consumers are confronting higher prices and
shortages of cars, children’s shoes and exercise gear, as the holiday shopping season looms
“It’s going to get worse again before it gets better,” said
Brian Bourke, chief growth officer at SEKO Logistics. “Global supply chains are
not built for this. Everything is breaking down.”
---- But the pandemic also exposed weaknesses in the
nation’s transport plumbing: investment shortfalls at key ports, controversial
railroad industry labor cuts, and a chronic failure by key players to
collaborate, according to interviews with more than 50 individuals representing
every link in the nation’s supply chain.
More
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/supply-chain-issues/?itid=sf_business
Inflation
takes from the ignorant and gives to the well informed.
Venita
VanCaspel (1986). “Money dynamics for the new economy.”
Though I
don’t think she had dodgy Federal Reserve Central Banksters in mind.
Covid-19 Corner
This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
China
PCR test orders soared before first confirmed COVID case Report on government contracts show surges in Wuhan-area
purchases from May 2019
MASAYA KATO, Nikkei staff writer
October 5, 2021 04:00 JST
TOKYO
-- Purchases of PCR tests in China's Hubei Province surged months before the
first official reports of a novel coronavirus case there, according to a report
by Australia-based cybersecurity company Internet 2.0.
About 67.4 million yuan ($10.5 million at current rates)
was spent on PCR tests in Hubei during 2019, nearly double the 2018 total, with
the upswing starting in May, according to the report.
Internet 2.0 collected and analyzed data from a website
that aggregates information on public procurement bids in China. The analysis
team consists of former officials from intelligence agencies in the U.S., the
U.K., Australia, and other countries.
The report casts further doubt on China's official line
about the origins of the virus, a topic that has fueled tensions between
Beijing and Washington. China's foreign ministry has disputed the report's
findings.
PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests are used to detect
the presence of a particular genetic sequence in a sample, and they have
applications beyond COVID-19 testing. But the report alleges the unusual uptick
likely signals awareness of a new disease spreading in and around Wuhan, the
capital of Hubei Province.
Orders doubled from universities, jumped fivefold from the
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and surged tenfold from
animal testing bureaus. Purchases from hospitals declined by more than 10%.
Monthly procurement data shows a spike in orders in May,
especially from CDC buyers and the People's Liberation Army.
"We believe the increased
spending in May suggests this as the earliest start date for possible
infection," the report said.
Purchases rose sharply from July
through October as well, in particular from the Wuhan University of Science and
Technology. The institution spent 8.92 million yuan on PCR tests in 2019, about
eight times its total for the previous year.
The university, along with local
hospitals and public health authorities, plays a direct role in responding to
outbreaks of new diseases, according to the report.
More
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/China-PCR-test-orders-soared-before-first-confirmed-COVID-case
BioNTech CEO reportedly says a
different COVID vaccine may be needed by next year Published: Oct. 4, 2021 at 2:58 a.m. ET
BioNTech’s chief executive officer Ugur Sahin told the Financial Times in an interview that COVID-19 is likely to
continue mutating to the point where it can escape vaccines and immune systems.
A COVID vaccine developed by BioNTech BNTX, -6.67% and Pfizer PFE, -0.19% , using mRNA technology has been used worldwide
to help fight the pandemic, with 1.5 billion doses shipped to more than 130
countries as of late September, according to a company presentation . Vaccines and booster
shots currently available are potent enough for the current strains, including
the highly contagious delta, but the virus has just started a process of
evolving, said Sahin, in the interview that published Sunday.
“We have no reason to assume that the next generation virus
will be easier to handle for the immune system than the existing generation,”
said Sahin, who sees the coming year’s focus on booster shots for the
vaccinated and a continued effort to vaccinate those who haven’t been
Last week, financial markets cheered news of Merck MRK, +8.37% and Ridgeback Therapeutics’ experimental oral
antiviral treatment for COVID-19. The drug, molnupiravir, cut risk of
hospitalization or death by 50% in a Phase 3 trial, and seems to work against
gamma, delta, and mu variants in around 40% of participants for whom sequencing
was available.
Read: Why
a pill you take at home could change the direction of the pandemic
Medical experts have warned though that Merck’s potentially
groundbreaking new treatment could
be used by some as an excuse not to get vaccinated . “It’s not a magic
pill,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University
Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/biontech-ceo-reportedly-says-a-different-covid-vaccine-may-be-needed-by-next-year-11633330721?mod=MW_article_top_stories
Virus surge hits New England
despite high vaccination rates By
WILSON RING October 3, 2021
Despite having the highest vaccination rates in
the country, there are constant reminders for most New England states of just how
vicious the delta variant of COVID-19 is .
Hospitals across the region are seeing full
intensive care units and staff shortages are starting to affect care. Public
officials are pleading with the unvaccinated to get the shots. Health care
workers are coping with pent-up demand for other kinds of care that had been
delayed by the pandemic.
“I think it’s clearly frustrating for all of
us,” said Michael Pieciak, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of
Financial Regulation who monitors COVID-19 statistics for the state. “We want
kids to be safe in school, we want parents not to have to worry about their
child’s education and health.”
Even though parts of New England are seeing
record case counts, hospitalizations and deaths that rival pre-vaccine peaks,
largely among the unvaccinated, the region hasn’t seen the impact the delta
variant wave has wrought on other parts of the country .
According to statistics from The Associated
Press, the five states with the highest percentage of a fully vaccinated
population are all in New England, with Vermont leading, followed by
Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. New Hampshire is 10th.
According to the AP data, full vaccination
rates across the six New England states range from a high of 69.4% in Vermont
to 61.5% in New Hampshire.
Despite the relatively high vaccination rates —
the U.S. as a whole is averaging 55.5% — there are still hundreds of thousands
of people across the region who, for one reason or another, remain unvaccinated
and vulnerable to infection.
Now, a Rhode Island official said he didn’t
think the
70% vaccination goal , once touted as the level that would help end the
pandemic in the state, is enough.
“What we’ve learned with delta and looking
beyond delta, is because that’s where our focus is as well, to really reach
those levels of vaccination, to give you that true population level protection,
you need to be in excess of 90%,” said Tom McCarthy, the executive director of
the Rhode Island Department of Health COVID Response Unit.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pandemics-vermont-d25aae90b2dda65b3d1c2c0d5d00156c
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
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.
A quantum computer by 2025?
Quantum computing hits the
desktop, no cryo-cooling required By Loz Blain September 27, 2021
An Australian/German company is developing
powerful quantum accelerators the size of graphics cards. They work at room
temperature, undercutting and outperforming today's huge, cryo-cooled quantum
supercomputers, and soon they'll be small enough for mobile devices .
Superconducting quantum computers are huge and incredibly
finicky machines at this point. They need to be isolated from anything that
might knock an electron's spin off and ruin a calculation. That includes
mechanical isolation, in extreme vacuum chambers, where only a few molecules
might remain in a cubic meter or two of space. It includes electromagnetic
forces – IBM, for example, surrounds its precious quantum bits, or qubits, with
mu metals to absorb all magnetic fields.
And it includes temperature. Any atom with a temperature
above absolute zero is by definition in a state of vibration, and any
temperature more than 10-15 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero simply
shakes the qubits to the poin where they can't maintain "coherence."
So most state-of-the-art quantum computers need to be cryogenically cooled
using complex and expensive equipment before the qubits will maintain their
state for any length of time and become useful.
Extreme vacuums, mu metals and microkelvin-temperature
cryogenic cooling: this is not a recipe for affordable, portable or easily
scalable quantum computing power. But an Australian-born startup says it has
developed a quantum microprocessor that needs none of these things. Indeed, it
runs happily at room temperature. Right now, it's the size of a rack unit.
Soon, it'll be the size of a decent graphics card, and before too long it'll be
small enough to fit in mobile devices alongside traditional processors.
---- Quantum Brilliance was founded in 2019 on the back of
research undertaken by its founders at the Australian National University,
where they developed techniques to manufacture, scale and control qubits
embedded in synthetic diamond.
---- This field itself is not new – indeed,
room-temperature quantum qubits have been around experimentally for more than
20 years. Quantum Brilliance's contribution to the field is in working out how
to manufacture these tiny things precisely and replicably, as well as in miniaturizing
and integrating the control structures you need to get information in and out
of the qubits – the two key areas that have held these devices back from
scaling beyond a few qubits to date.
---- "The fundamental property we're using,"
says new hire Mark Mattingley-Scott, who will oversee operations for the
company in Germany, "is nuclear spin, and not the spin of an electron. An
atom cares a lot less about thermal vibrations, for example, than an electron,
so this way we can run them at room temperature. In the nitrogen vacancy,
there's a hole, and through that we're able to interact with the qubits. There
are multiple interactions, so we actually get potentially multiple qubits per
vacancy."
The company has already built a
number of "Quantum development kits" in rack units, each with around
5 qubits to work with, and it's placing them with customers already, for
benchmarking, integration, co-design opportunities and to let companies start
working out where they'll be advantageous once they hit the market in a
~50-qubit "Quantum Accelerator" product form by around 2025. "We
think over a decade," says Luo, "we can even produce a quantum
system-on-a-chip for mobile devices. Because this is truly material science
technology that can achieve that."
More
https://newatlas.com/quantum-computing/quantum-computing-desktop-room-temperature/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=66295c3787-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_10_01_07_49&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-66295c3787-90625829
“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.
Is
it serious now?
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