Baltic Dry Index. 2591 -168 Brent Crude 81.71
Spot Gold 1853
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 17/11/21 World 255,100,870
Deaths 5,129,847
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
Ronald Reagan.
Get ready for some real inflation in the USA and pretty fast. America is about to spend, spend, spend its way into the history books.
Spend, spend, spend its way into the GIANT INFLATION. More probably the GIANT STAGFLATION.
And sadly the first trillion dollar giant spending, kicking off early next year isn’t all. Another 1.75 trillion on “social infrastructure” is intended to be following right behind it.
Of course, this giant US inflation won’t stay bottled up in the USA, where it will only devalue the US dollar and American’s standard of living. It will leach out pretty fast into the global economy, where it will start devaluing all fiat currencies and everyone else’s standard of living.
Pretty soon we’ll all be asking “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
Get physical gold and silver now, although for most Americans it will probably get confiscated due to precedence.
Asia-Pacific stocks fall as Japan’s automaker shares slip; Baidu earnings ahead
SINGAPORE — Declines across Asia-Pacific stocks continued on Wednesday afternoon, as Japan’s exports growth hit an eight-month low. Markets in the U.S., however, were lifted on the back of stronger-than-expected retail sales data.
Australia and South Korea led losses in the region. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 fell nearly 1%. Financial stocks were lower, with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia leading losses as its shares plummeted more than 8%.
News in the region may help boost sentiment, after New Zealand’s Prime Minister announced that the country’s largest city Auckland will reopen its domestic borders from Dec. 15 for fully vaccinated people and those with negative Covid test results, according to a Reuters report.
South Korea’s Kospi was down nearly 1% as well.
Mainland Chinese stocks bucked the regional trend. The Shanghai Composite was up 0.2%, while the Shenzhen Component roseb0.43%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped 0.46%.
In earnings, Chinese tech giant Baidu is set to announce its third-quarter results later on Wednesday.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.58%.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.38% after trading in positive territory earlier, while the Topix dropped 0.53%. Exports in Japan rose 9.4% in October, Reuters reported, citing data from the country’s finance ministry. That followed a 13% expansion in the previous month, and was the weakest growth since a drop in February. Auto shipments fell 36.7%.
----U.S. stocks, which were in a rut in recent days after touching records earlier this month, were given a boost by retail sales data. The latest retail sales figures for October showed consumers were increasing their spending, with sales jumping 1.7% compared to a 0.8% increase in the prior month.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 54.77 points, or 0.15%, to 36,142.22. The S&P 500 gained 0.39% to 4,700.90, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.76% to 15,973.86.
“The strength in the US economic activity, combined with the above‑target inflation, might increase pressure on the [Federal Open Market Committee] to quicken the pace of its tapering of asset purchases,” the Commonwealth Bank of Australia wrote in a note on Wednesday.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/asia-markets-us-retail-sales-data-oil-and-currencies.html
So just how big is a trillion fiat dollars created at the push of a computer button?
How Big is a Trillion?
In the U.S., one trillion is written as the number "1" followed by 12 zeros (1,000,000,000,000). One year of clock time =
(60sec/min) x (60 min/hr) x (24 hr/da) x (365.25 da) = 3.16 x 107 sec
One trillion seconds of ordinary clock time =
( 1012 sec)/( 3.16 x 107 sec/yr) = 31,546 years!
Six trillion seconds equals 189,276 years. Now, as an aside, along with the nearly six trillion miles in the light-year, you might be interested to know that there are nearly five [25 update] trillion dollars in the current U.S. national debt. Is it any wonder that our politicians in Washington are concerned?
(An interesting bit of trivia: If one were to count the national Debt at the rate of one dollar per second, he or she would have to use a mechanical counter to click off the digits. Why? Because, if he or she counted in the usual way, saying "one, two, three, …" etc., there would be numbers whose names are so large, that it would take more than a second of clock time to pronounce them. For example: "Nine hundred and ninety nine billion, nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine," takes about 8 seconds to pronounce.)
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/how_big_is_a_trillion.htm
UBS, DBS Top Executives Warn That High Inflation May Stay
By Patrick Winters and Ameya KarveUpdated on 17 November 2021, 03:48 GMT
The heads of two global banks predicted an uncertain time ahead for the world economy as inflation rises and persists.
The world may see “uncomfortably high” rates of inflation for one to three years, UBS Group AG Chairman Axel Weber said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore Wednesday. Inflation is getting a lot more structural, DBS Group Holdings Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Piyush Gupta said at the event.
More
Finally, inexplicably, Germany shoots itself in its winter boots. Better double the winter Schnapps order!
A cold Europe looms. Europe needs to pray for a very mild winter.
Given the Eur-Asian snow cover and Arctic ice cover in mid-November, it more often than not suggests much of Europe is headed for a colder than normal winter, although with the Arctic sea ice extent slightly below normal, not a harsh winter.
Gas prices jump as Germany suspends Nord Stream 2 certification
LaToya HardingTue, November 16, 2021, 12:16 PM
Germany’s energy regulator has temporarily suspended certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, after the Swiss-based project created a German subsidiary to own and operate the German section of the pipeline.
The Bundesnetzagentur said Nord Stream 2, which was set to begin operations this year, failed to organise an operator recognised under German law, sending gas prices higher.
“The subsidiary itself must meet the requirements of the Energy Industry Act for an independent transport network operator,” the regulator said in a statement.
“The certification process remains suspended until the transfer of the essential assets and human resources to the subsidiary has been completed.
“The Federal Network Agency will be able to check the newly submitted document of the subsidiary as the new applicant for completeness.”
The project is set to pump 55 billion cubic metres of gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. This would allow gas exporter Gazprom to reach customers on the bloc and bypass pipelines through Ukraine.
The 760-mile link has been built at a cost of €9.5bn (£8bn, $10.8bn), and could potentially meet one third of Europe's gas needs, according to Gazprom.
The head of the Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, which opposes the pipeline as it will lose revenues if gas from Russia bypasses pipelines on Ukrainian territory, welcomed the German regulator’s decision to suspend certification.
It comes as yet another setback to the Kremlin-backed gas project, despite pressure from Vladimir Putin to approve Nord Stream 2, causing UK and European gas prices to spike on Tuesday.
UK gas contracts for delivery in December jumped 10% to £2.24 a therm, while the European benchmark rose 8% to €87.80 per megawatt hour.
More
“We
don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a
trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
So, given that these rent increases and soaring house prices are “transitory,” when will the bent central banksters let us in on the secret of when both will start to fall?
“Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.”
Landlords hiking rents at fastest pace since 2008 as demand for housing in London shoots up
Tuesday 16 November 2021 8:48 am
Private sector rents in September were 4.6 per cent higher than a year earlier at £968 per month on average, marking the strongest growth in 13 years.
The fastest rice since 2008 comes as strong demand outstrips supply, according to an index.
Excluding London, rents across the UK were up by 6 per cent annually, a figure which Zoopla said was a 14-year high.
But rents in London are now also starting to climb as people return to offices, with annual price growth of 1.6 per cent recorded in the latest report, compared with falls of nearly 10 per cent at the start of the year.
Rents in the South West of England were up by 9 per cent annually, making it the region registering the fastest rental growth in the third quarter of 2021.
And rents in Purbeck in Dorset were up by 16.2 per cent annually, making it the location with the highest rate of rental growth.
Zoopla said demand is continuing to outstrip supply and putting an upward pressure on rents.
Rental growth is also partly due to the popularity of properties in higher price bands, reflecting an ongoing search for space during the coronavirus pandemic.
Annual growth in rental prices stood at 2.7 per cent in Scotland (averaging £627 per month), 5.8 per cent in Northern Ireland (£633 per month typically) and 7.7 per cent in Wales (£660 per month).
Grainne Gilmore, head of research at Zoopla said: “The swing back of demand into city centres, including London, has underpinned another rise in rents in quarter three, especially as the supply of rental property remains tight.”
More
Will Real Estate Ever Be Normal Again?
In Austin, Texas, and cities around the country, prices are skyrocketing, forcing regular people to act like speculators. When will it end?
Francesca Mari Published Nov. 12, 2021 Updated Nov. 15, 2021
---- For Amena and Drew, their Austin home-buying odyssey was just beginning — a monthslong ordeal that would teach them quite a bit about the cruel realities of America’s housing market, in which home prices nationwide have risen by an astonishing 24.8 percent since March 2020. And this first lesson, appropriately enough, demonstrated just one of many ways that the old, measured rules of home-buying no longer applied — that the cutthroat competitiveness that once defined only a few U.S. markets (San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles) had now become standard across the country, as the median home price in small- and medium-size metropolitan areas rose by jaw-dropping levels: Boise, Idaho, 46 percent; Phoenix, 36 percent; Austin, 35 percent; Salt Lake City, 33 percent; Sacramento, 28 percent.
By bidding on two properties she had never visited, in a city nearly 2,000 miles away, Amena joined the 63 percent of North American home buyers in 2020 who made at least one offer on a home that they had never stepped into. Homes had been one of the few things resistant to online shopping: We browsed online, but we didn’t buy. The pandemic changed that. The result was a market that moved much, much faster.
What Amena and Drew would ultimately learn about Covid-era real estate was not just the necessity of raising their budget and lowering their expectations. It was also that the whole mind-set required to buy a house, the most important purchase that most Americans will ever make, had undergone a fundamental transformation — possibly a long-term one, given the realities of both supply and demand. Freddie Mac estimated at the end of 2020 that the United States was 3.8 million housing units short of meeting the nation’s needs. Combine that with the surge of millennials into the housing market — they represented more than half of all mortgage originations last year — as well as the insatiable appetite of investors, who now snatch up nearly one in six homes sold in America, and the contours of a new, lightning-fast, permanently desperate housing market come clearly into view.
More.
“I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.”
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Below, is this the reason that repurposed drugs that are anti-viral and effective against Covid-19 are blocked?
Not
to worry or fret, Pfizermectin Paxlovid to the rescue at hundreds of
dollars a course. Doesn’t the WHO issue Ivermectin in Africa a six US cents a
pill?
Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna making $1,000 profit every second: analysis
November 16, 2021
Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute from their highly successful COVID-19 vaccines while the world's poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated, according to a new analysis.
The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to rich countries, leaving low-income nations in the lurch, said the People's Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to COVID vaccines, which based its calculations on the firms' own earning reports.
The Alliance estimates that the trio will make pre-tax profits of $34 billion this year between them, which works out to over $1,000 a second, $65,000 a minute or $93.5 million a day.
"It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus," Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People's Vaccine Alliance Africa said.
"Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritise the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold."
Pfizer and BioNTech have delivered less than one percent of their total supplies to low-income countries while Moderna has delivered just 0.2 percent, the PVA said.
Currently, 98 percent of people in low-income countries have not been fully vaccinated.
The three companies' actions are in contrast to AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which provided their vaccines on a not-for-profit basis, though both have announced they foresee ending this arrangement in future as the pandemic winds down.
PVA said that despite receiving public funding of more than $8 billion, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have refused calls to transfer vaccine technology to producers in low- and middle-income countries via the World Health Organization, "a move that could increase global supply, drive down prices and save millions of lives."
"In Moderna's case, this is despite explicit pressure from the White House and requests from the WHO that the company collaborate in and help accelerate its plan to replicate the Moderna vaccine for wider production at its mRNA hub in South Africa," the group said.
While Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has dismissed technology transfer as "dangerous nonsense," the WHO's decision to grant emergency use approval to the Indian-developed Covaxin earlier this month proves that developing countries have the capacity and expertise, PVA added.
PVA, whose 80 members include the African Alliance, Global Justice Now, Oxfam, and UNAIDS, is calling for pharmaceutical corporations to immediately suspend intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines by agreeing to a proposed waiver of World Trade Organisation's TRIPS agreement.
More than 100 nations, including the United States, back that move, but it is being blocked by rich countries including the UK and Germany.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-pfizer-biontech-moderna-profit-analysis.html
Pfizer submits FDA application for emergency approval of Covid treatment pill
Pfizer on Tuesday submitted its application to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of its Covid-19 treatment pill, saying it reduces hospitalization and death by 89% when administered with a common HIV drug.
If authorized by the FDA, the pill could help revolutionize the fight against Covid by allowing high-risk people infected with the virus to take an oral antiviral drug at home instead of going to the hospital. Such a treatment could help reduce the strain that has been put on hospital systems during the pandemic.
The pill, known as Paxlovid, blocks the activity of an enzyme the virus needs to replicate. Paxlovid is used in combination with a low dose of ritonavir, an HIV drug, to slow the patient’s metabolism, allowing the drug to remain active in the body at a higher concentration for a longer period to combat the virus
In a clinical trial of people 18 and over at an increased risk of developing severe Covid, the combination of Paxlovid and ritonavir reduced hospitalization and death by 89% when taken within three days of the onset of symptoms, according to Pfizer.
Pfizer said the Covid treatment proved to be safe, adding that there were fewer adverse events reported by trial participants who took Paxlovid than the placebo and that most of those were “mild in intensity.”
If approved, Paxlovid will be administered in two 150 mg tablets along with one 100 mg tablet of ritonavir twice daily.
----The Biden administration is expected to announce a multibillion-dollar deal this week to purchase 10 million courses of Pfizer’s pill, according to The Washington Post.
More
In other Covid-19 news, Bah humbug! Munich cancels Christmas, well the Christmas Market anyway. Who needs/wants to stand around in cold weather outside of a wooden garden shed drinking Pilsner anyway?
I once spent an afternoon in a freezing-fog, being “entertained” in Hamburg’s Christmas market by some German clients, “repaying” my earlier NYC hospitality in 5 star restaurants and the like. At least I never threatened them with the loss of their nose, fingers and toes!
Munich Cancels Popular Christmas Market Over Covid Surge: Mayor
By AFP - Agence France Presse November 16, 2021
The German city of Munich on Tuesday cancelled its upcoming Christmas market, which usually draws some three million visitors annually, citing Bavaria's "dramatic" coronavirus resurgence.
"The dramatic situation in our hospitals and the exponentially increasing infection figures leave me no other choice: unfortunately, the Munich Christmas market cannot take place this year," mayor Dieter Reiter said in a statement. Many German Christmas markets were called off in 2020 because of the pandemic, but Munich is the first major one to do so this year.
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
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
What do you call a penguin in the Sahara desert?
Lost.
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
Ultra-large single-crystal WS2 monolayer
Date: November 15, 2021
Source: Institute for Basic Science
Summary: A new technique opens a possibility to replace silicon with 2D materials in semiconducting technology.
As silicon based semiconducting technology is approaching the limit of its performance, new materials that may replace or partially replace silicon in technology is highly desired. Recently, the emergence of graphene and other two-dimensional (2D) materials offers a new platform for building next generation semiconducting technology. Among them, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as MoS2, WS2, MoSe2, WSe2, as most appealing 2D semiconductors.
A prerequisite of building ultra-large-scale high-performance semiconducting circuits is that the base materials must be a single-crystal of wafer-scale, just like the silicon wafer used today. Although great efforts have been dedicated to the growth of wafer-scale single-crystals of TMDs, the success was very limited until now.
Distinguished Professor Feng Ding and his research team from the Center for Multidimensional CarbonMaterials (CMCM), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) at UNIST, in cooperation with researcher at Peking University (PKU), Beijing Institute of Technology, and Fudan University, reported the direct growth of 2-inch single-crystal WS2 monolayer films very recently. Besides the WS2, the research team also demonstrated the growth of single-crystal MoS2, WSe2, and MoSe2 in wafer scale as well.
The key technology of epitaxially grown a large sing-crystal is to ensure that all small single-crystal grown on a substrate are uniformly aligned. Because TMDs has non-centrosymmetric structure or the mirror image of a TMD with respect to an edge of it has opposite alignment, we must break such a symmetry by carefully design the substrate. Based on theoretical calculations, the authors proposed a mechanisms of "dual-coupling-guided epitaxy growth" for experimental design. The WS2-sapphireplane interaction as the first driving force, leading to two preferred antiparallel orientations of the WS2 islands. The coupling between WS2 and sapphire step-edge is the second driving force and it will break the degeneracy of the two antiparallel orientations. Then all the TMD single crystals grown on a substrate with step edges are all unidirectional aligned and finally, the coalescence of these small single-crystals leads to a large single-crystal of the same size of the substrate.
"This new dual-coupling epitaxy growth mechanism is new for controllable materials growth. In principle, it allows us realize to grow all 2D materials into large-area single crystals if proper substrate was found." Says Dr. Ting Cheng, the co-first author of the study. "We have considered how to choose proper substrates theoretically. First, the substrate should have a low symmetry and, secondly, more step edges are preferred." emphasizes Professor Feng Ding, the corresponding author of the study
More
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
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