Baltic Dry Index. 2296 +07 Brent Crude 82.70
Spot Gold 1791
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 07/01/22 World 300,864,271
Deaths 5,490,090
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Frederic Bastiat.
Look away from the soaring price of oil and the surging global omicron infections now.
In the central bankster funded stock casinos, more worry that the central banksters might actually be serious about taking away the punch bowl! They wouldn’t do that, would they?
Well not unless they want a modern day, global repeat of Europe 1848.
But does anyone remember 1848?
Are we all soon to resemble Kazakhstan?
Asia-Pacific stocks mixed as investors reassess concerns over potential Fed policy tightening
SINGAPORE — Shares in Asia-Pacific were mixed in Friday trade following heavy losses for some regional markets in the previous trading day, as investors continue to assess the impact of a potentially faster-than-expected policy tightening by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
The Nikkei 225 in Japan shed earlier gains and declined 0.13%, adding to losses after a nearly 3% drop on Thursday. The Topix index also fell into negative territory as it declined 0.19%.
Elsewhere, mainland Chinese stocks were mixed as the Shanghai composite climbed 0.35% while the Shenzhen component shed 0.2%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index jumped 1.15%.
South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.97%. Shares in Australia were up, with the S&P/ASX 200 rising 1.29%.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan edged 0.6% higher.
Markets were spooked earlier in the week and fell sharply after minutes from the Fed’s December meeting showed officials at the central bank ready to aggressively dial back policy help.
The yield on the benchmark U.S. 10-year Treasury note rose as high as 1.75% on Thursday, last sitting at 1.7158% — still much higher after ending 2021 at 1.51%. Yields move inversely to prices.
Hong Kong-listed shares of Chinese real estate firms were mixed in Friday trade after Reuters reported that developer Shimao Group defaulted on a trust loan, renewing concerns over the sector.
Shimao shares in Hong Kong plunged 7.04% while Kaisa Group fell 1.23%. Meanwhile, China Evergrande Group climbed 2.42% and Sunac jumped 2.91%. The Hang Seng Properties index gained 1.48%.
Overnight on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 170.64 points to 36,236.47 while the S&P 500 shed about 0.1% to 4,696.05. The Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.13% to about 15,080.87.
The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 96.217 — holding above levels below 96 seen earlier this week.
The Japanese yen traded at 115.87 per dollar, stronger than levels above 116 against the greenback seen yesterday. The Australian dollar was at $0.7162 after yesterday’s drop from above $0.72.
Oil prices were higher in the afternoon of Asia trading hours, with international benchmark Brent crude futures up 0.63% to $82.51 per barrel. U.S. crude futures gained 0.76% to $80.06 per barrel.
Revolt in Kazakhstan: What's Happening, and Why It Matters
Thu, January 6, 2022, 12:43 PM
Thousands of angry protesters have taken to the streets of Kazakhstan in recent days, the biggest crisis to shake the autocratic country in decades. The events are a stark challenge to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev less than three years into his rule and are destabilizing an already volatile region where Russia and the United States compete for influence.
Video posted online Wednesday showed people storming the main government building in Almaty, the largest city, while protesters set police vehicles on fire, as well as the regional branch of the governing Nur Otan party.
What is happening in Kazakhstan and why?Thousands of angry protesters have taken to the streets of Kazakhstan in recent days, the biggest crisis to shake the autocratic country in decades. The events are a stark challenge to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev less than three years into his rule and are destabilizing an already volatile region where Russia and the United States compete for influence.
Video posted online Wednesday showed people storming the main government building in Almaty, the largest city, while protesters set police vehicles on fire, as well as the regional branch of the governing Nur Otan party.
The protests, which have prompted the Kazakh government to seek help from a Russia-led military alliance, have taken a violent turn, with the police saying Thursday that dozens of demonstrators had been killed.
The protests were sparked by anger over surging fuel prices. But they have intensified into something more significant and combustible: widespread discontent about the suffocating authoritarian government and a sharp critique of endemic corruption that has resulted in wealth being concentrated within a small political and economic elite.
What led to the protests?
Anger boiled over when the government lifted price caps for liquefied petroleum gas, a low-carbon fuel that many Kazakhs use to power their cars. But the protests have more deep-seated roots, including anger at social and economic disparities, exacerbated by a raging pandemic, as well the lack of real democracy. The average salary in Kazakhstan is the equivalent of $570 a month, according to the government’s statistics, although many people earn far less.
More
https://www.yahoo.com/news/revolt-kazakhstan-whats-happening-why-124356042.html
In “better” news, is the pandemic peaking? Probably, but it’s still too early to tell.
Omicron may have peaked or ‘plateaued’ in parts of the world, giving experts cause for optimism
In a matter of weeks, the Covid-19 omicron variant — first detected in South Africa and Botswana in November — has surged around the world, leading to millions of new cases and the reimposition of coronavirus restrictions in many countries.
The U.S. and Europe have been rolling out booster shots as fast as they can following research findings by Covid vaccine makers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna that the omicron variant undermines the effectiveness of the standard two doses of their Covid shots, but that booster shots significantly increase the level of protection against the strain.
Nonetheless, cases in both regions have soared, with the U.S. reporting more than 1 million new daily Covid cases on Monday, and the U.K. and France also among those reporting staggering numbers of daily infections, upward of 200,000 a day in recent tallies. Hospitalizations are also steadily rising in affected countries, although admissions and deaths remain far below previous peaks.
As well as an increasing body of evidence suggesting that omicron causes less serious disease than its predecessors, experts are cautiously optimistic that while the omicron wave is proving to be sharper than those associated with previous variants, it could also be shorter.
South Africa believes its omicron wave has peaked, for example, and London — where omicron cases surged in December before the variant really took hold in the rest of Europe — may be seeing cases starting to plateau, according to experts, fueling hope that the wave could soon peak elsewhere, too.
Omicron ‘may have passed the peak’
South Africa’s government issued a statement on Dec. 30 in which it said that the country’s Department of Health had reported a 29.7% decrease in the number of new cases detected in the week ended Dec. 25 (89,781 cases), compared with the number of new cases detected in the previous week (127,753).
“All indicators suggest the country may have passed the peak of the fourth wave at a national level,” the statement said, with cases declining in all provinces except the Western Cape and Eastern Cape, which recorded increases of 14% and 18%, respectively.
Nonetheless, there has been a decline in hospital admissions in all provinces except the Western Cape, the statement added, noting that admissions had been generally lower with the omicron variant.
“While the omicron variant is highly transmissible, there has been lower rates of hospitalisation than in previous waves. This means that the country has a spare capacity for admission of patients even for routine health services. There is a marginal increase in the number of deaths in all the provinces.”
----Global experts have been watching South Africa’s Covid data closely, as it was among the first countries to detect the omicron variant and to alert the World Health Organization, which designated the heavily mutated strain a “variant of concern” on Nov. 26.
----When omicron was first detected by doctors in South Africa, they observed that their patients appeared to be experiencing milder illnesses more akin to a cold than the flu, symptoms of which were associated with earlier strains of Covid. South African doctors also found that most people hospitalized with omicron had been admitted to the hospital for other reasons and did not require oxygen.
Another study published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases on Dec. 28 suggested that the omicron wave of hospital admissions in Tshwane (a city in South Africa’s Gauteng province where omicron cases surged in December) had peaked “within 4 weeks of its commencement. Hospital admissions increased rapidly and began to decline within a period of 33 days.”
More
Finally, just as the world has “agreed” to give up on fossil fuels as per COP26 last November, ExxonMobil goes and discovers more oil.
ExxonMobil discovers more oil off Guyana's coast
Wed, January 5, 2022, 5:40 PM
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — ExxonMobil said Wednesday that it made two additional oil discoveries off the coast of Guyana as the South American country prepares to become the world’s newest major oil producer.
The discoveries occurred in an area where officials believe they can extract at least 10 billion oil-equivalent barrels.
The company said a vessel that arrived in Guyana late last year is expected to start production in upcoming months with a target of up to 220,000 barrels of oil a day. Officials said another vessel will start production in 2024.
Guyana issued its first oil and gas license to ExxonMobil in 2017 after the company said it made “significant” oil discoveries off the country’s Atlantic coast. The deal is expected to generate up to $5 billion a year for Guyana.
ExxonMobil began exploring for oil and gas near Guyana in 2008 and drilled its first exploration well in 2015. It is working with three partners: Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, an operator that holds 45% interest, Hess Guyana Exploration Ltd., which holds 30% interest and CNOOC Petroleum Guyana Limited, which holds 25% interest.
The recent oil discoveries have reignited a decades-old border dispute with neighboring Venezuela, which claims ownership of waters that various companies are exploring for oil.
The government of Guyana, which depends on products like gold, rice, sugar and bauxite, has pledged free education, free cooking gas and cheap gasoline with the anticipated oil revenues.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exxonmobil-discovers-more-oil-off-174044216.html
"Anytime you don't want anything, you get it."
Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States.
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Chinese ports of Ningbo and Shanghai shut once again / Main export season heavily curtailed before Chinese New Year / Shipping companies increasingly investing in inland logistics
The start of a new year, all clocks set to zero, a
fresh start – not a chance! Problems from the world of logistics remain with us
in the new year. China’s reaction to new coronavirus infections is, as usual,
uncompromising. So, it is not surprising that the world’s third-largest
container port in Ningbo / China is once again barely operational because of
restrictive measures. In the meantime, around 120 container ships, with a total
of more than 600,000 TEU (20-foot equivalent units) are piling up in front of
port entrances at Ningbo and Shanghai, waiting to be cleared. The strict
quarantine orders for a good 200 navigators on the Yangtze River also increase
the number of ships that appear to be stranded.
An actual time window for possible improvement is not available at present. But
that is exactly what is needed right now, as the peak season for Chinese
exports is expected to run at full steam. On 1 February, the country sees a
celebration of the Chinese New Year and remains on holiday for a week. Chemical
companies in particular, however, are more likely to shut down or at least
reduce production for three to four weeks. The reasons for this are manifold:
from a lack of precursors to transport possibilities to punitive measures on
the part of the government because of non-compliance with CO2
emissions standards.
The traffic jams in front of the US ports – for example Long Beach and Los
Angeles – as well as in front of Antwerp and Rotterdam have not yet been worked
through either. Not to mention, the innumerable problems of hinterland
logistics, intensified on both continents by the virus.
It is thus astonishing that there is hardly any movement in spot prices for main
container routes at present. From China to the west coast of North America, the
price for a 40-foot container (FEU) remains at the previous week’s level of USD
14,700 (EUR 12,890), according to Plasteurope.com research. The average
transport premium from China to the east coast of North America also remains
unchanged. Here, as in the previous week, customers have to invest USD 17,480
in passage.
Prices from China to Europe also remain unchanged at a high level. From Asia to
Northern Europe, container transport costs USD 14,500 at the beginning of the
year, and USD 1,450 on average for the return journey. From Northern Europe to
the US East Coast, USD 7,250 continues to be demanded and paid. Only the route
back to the Old World is becoming more expensive by a whopping 10%, and now
costs USD 550.
More
https://www.plasteurope.com/news/LOGISTICS_t249335/
British firms intend to hike prices five per cent this year
Thursday 06 January 2022 1:22 pm
British businesses are laying the foundations to hike prices sharply this year as they scramble to survive amid soaring costs, reveal official figures published today.
UK firms are intending to raise prices five per cent this year, according to the Bank of England’s survey of chief financial officers of British businesses.
A toxic combination of an energy crunch in Europe, an ongoing labour squeeze and a recovery in oil demand has swelled firms’ costs across the board.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate prices for materials used by British factories have jumped over 14 per cent over the last year, with crude oil prices alone up over 80 per cent.
The ONS latest business insights and impacts survey, released today, found 36 per cent of businesses stated their costs had increased “compared to usual expectations”.
As a result, businesses are having to rejig pricing to protect their margins and remain viable in the long term.
A reduction in income stemming from a sharp pull back in spending as consumers exercised greater caution in the face of the Omicron variant is strengthening businesses’ incentives to hike prices.
In the three months to December, UK firms lost seven per cent of sales due to the Covid-19 crisis, the Bank said.
The Bank’s own figures will agitate officials at Threadneedle Street, who are under pressure to get a grip on roaring inflation.
Economists at investment banking giant Goldman Sachs think the cost of living could climb as high as 6.8 per cent this April, driven higher by the energy regulator, Ofgem, hiking the energy price cap by around 50 per cent.
The Bank expects inflation to peak at six per cent.
Last month, members of the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) voted 8-1 in favour of lifting rates 15 basis points from a record low 0.1 per cent, the first time borrowing costs have increased in over three years.
The MPC will announce their next rate decision on February 3.
https://www.cityam.com/british-firms-intend-to-hike-prices-five-per-cent-this-year/
Freak Weather, Climate Change Are Supply Chains’ Next Headache
By Olivia Rockeman6 January 2022, 12:00 GMT
Climate change and extreme weather events will present ongoing challenges for global supply chains in the coming years, even as pandemic-related bottlenecks ease.
The impacts in 2021 alone of Hurricane Ida, a typhoon near Chinese ports, the Texas freeze, British Columbia flooding and freak December tornadoes across the U.S., make it clear that global trade is struggling to cope with much more than a health crisis.
As temperatures creep higher, nature is likely to be a more frequent, intense and random disrupter. (Check out the full story here.)
“It’s not the next big supply-chain crisis. It’s the next big supply-chain crises, plural,” said Jason Jay, director of the sustainability initiative at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
In addition to warming temperatures and a growing frequency of extreme weather events, companies will have invest in climate change mitigation efforts including the transition to green energy and regulations on environmental due diligence.
Plant Closures
Those changes create cost pressures and can lead to accidental disruptions, as was seen in China this year when he closure of coal plants led to an energy crisis, said Ethan Harris, head of global economic research at Bank of America.
A first step companies can take to mitigate the impact of extreme weather is to map their supply chains to better understand exactly where risks lie, whether that’s a supplier on the Gulf Coast subject to hurricanes or a transport hub susceptible to flooding.
“Companies don’t even know that the locations of their first-tier suppliers let alone who their suppliers are buying from,” Jay said. “And many times these supply chains are four or five steps deep.”
While the disruptions from climate change won’t happen everywhere at once, as was the case with the pandemic, the severity of the impact will only increase over time. Many companies aren’t prepared.
More
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Mumbai is ‘prepared for the worst’ as 3rd Covid wave sweeps India, city’s municipal commissioner says
Published Thu, Jan 6 2022 2:36 AM EST
India’s financial hub Mumbai has a robust health-care infrastructure that can withstand a growing number of Covid cases, the city’s governing civic body told CNBC on Thursday.
India faced a critical shortage of oxygen last year during the second Covid wave between February and May. In June, the state of Maharashtra — where Mumbai is located — directed local oxygen producers to ramp up production and storage capacities to tackle future waves of infection.
“The health infrastructure in Mumbai is so robust that we are prepared for the worst, but we hope for the best,” Iqbal Singh Chahal, commissioner of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”
New Covid wave in India
India is preparing for a third wave of Covid infections as cases rise again.
Government data showed that daily reported cases crossed 90,000 on Thursday for the first time since June.
Like the rest of the country, daily reported cases in Maharashtra are also ticking higher, and the state accounts for nearly 800 cases attributed to the omicron variant that was first identified by South African scientists. Mumbai reported more than 15,000 new cases over a 24-hour period on Wednesday.
Chahal said he wasn’t worried.
“There’s absolutely no need to panic because you see in spite of 62,000 cases, we have 84% beds lying vacant and the symptoms are very mild,” the commissioner said. “The best thing about omicron is that it takes the space of delta variant, which was lethal, which would take you to oxygenated and ICU ventilator beds very fast.”
To be clear, while studies have shown that omicron appears to be less severe than delta, health experts have stressed caution and say it may be too early to tell how severe the variant is.
Chahal told CNBC the city would have an adequate supply of oxygen and hospital beds to tackle a surge in infections, even as some local reports said Maharashtra has fallen behind in its oxygen production targets.
He claimed majority of the new cases are asymptomatic and that only a small number of people are currently requiring hospitalization. Even those patients are spending only between three to five days in hospitals, according to the commissioner.
According to Indian media, Chahal and the BMC have directed the city’s 142 private hospitals to prepare for a surge in cases in the coming days, asking them to prepare adequate beds comparable to the peak of the second wave last year.
Chahal told CNBC that as of now, Mumbai has not reimposed any curfews — while no more than five people are allowed to gather between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m., hotels, restaurants, public transports as well as trains, buses, taxis and private cars are operating normally, he said.
----So far, India has reported 2,630 Covid cases attributed to the omicron variant in 26 states and union territories. Maharashtra and the capital territory of Delhi account for nearly 48% of those cases, according to government figures.
Total reported cases in the country exceeded 35 million and more than 482,000 people have died, health ministry data showed. India also reported its first omicron-related death on Wednesday, media reports said.
India has fully vaccinated around 44% of its adult population. Starting Jan. 3, it rolled out an inoculation program for adolescents between 15 and 18 years.
More
US Army testing universal coronavirus vaccine against all variants
Rich Haridy January 05, 2022
Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are leading a massive project aimed at developing a universal coronavirus vaccine that can provide protection against all SARS-CoV-2 variants. A handful of newly published studies are reporting successful preclinical results and Phase 2 human trials are set to kick off very soon.
As scientists around the world received the first genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020 many began to work on developing an all-important vaccine. A team from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) decided to tackle the problem from a different angle. Instead of racing to produce a specific, targeted SARS-CoV-2 vaccine the researchers chose to play a longer game and investigate a more broadly protective vaccine that could produce immune responses against all kinds of coronaviruses, including any specific variants that may arise.
“The accelerating emergence of human coronaviruses throughout the past two decades and the rise of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including most recently Omicron, underscore the continued need for next-generation preemptive vaccines that confer broad protection against coronavirus diseases,” explains Kayvon Modjarrad, from WRAIR’s Emerging Infectious Diseases Branch. “Our strategy has been to develop a ‘pan-coronavirus’ vaccine technology that could potentially offer safe, effective and durable protection against multiple coronavirus strains and species.”
Now, two years into this global pandemic, the research is bearing fruit as a number of recently published studies outline an innovative nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccine is called SpFN, or the spike ferritin nanoparticle vaccine.
Instead of focusing on a single permutation of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as most first-wave COVID-19 vaccines have, this technology harnesses the unique structure of ferritin proteins to present the body with a broad array of different coronavirus antigens.
Ferritin is a naturally occurring protein best known as an iron-carrying particle in human bodies. Its unique structure has been said to resemble a soccer ball in that it has 24 different faces. Before the pandemic researchers had been investigating ferritin nanoparticles as a technology for a universal influenza vaccine because a different viral antigen can be attached to each of those 24 faces.
In the context of a coronavirus vaccine, scientists can attach a different spike protein to each of the 24 faces of a ferritin nanoparticle. This means a single nanoparticle could hold spikes from not only a variety of SARS-CoV-2 variants, but a variety of other common coronaviruses.
“This vaccine stands out in the COVID-19 vaccine landscape,” explains Modjarrad. “The repetitive and ordered display of the coronavirus spike protein on a multi-faced nanoparticle may stimulate immunity in such a way as to translate into significantly broader protection.”
Over the last few months WFAIR researchers have published a number of preclinical studies testing its SpFN vaccine in animals. All studies demonstrated the novel vaccine produced robust immune responses against several SARS-CoV-2 variants.
But perhaps the most promising preclinical study was published in mid-December in Science Translational Medicine. It reported extraordinarily broad neutralizing antibody responses in nonhuman primates against a variety of SARS-CoV-2 variants as well as effective immune responses against the original SARS virus from 2002.
In April 2021 the research team started a Phase 1 human clinical trial testing the safety of the vaccine in a cohort of healthy adults. Results from the Phase 1 trial are yet to be formally announced but Modjarrad did reveal last month that the trial was successful, saying in an interview with Defense One, “so far everything has been moving along exactly as we had hoped.”
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
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.
Not the usual update today. Today, finally, we finish the week with a good news story. Everyone deserves a good news story every now and again. Look away from Kazakhstan now.
A dog found alone on a highway led police to her injured owner after a car crash
Wed, January 5, 2022, 5:43 PM
· A dog led New Hampshire State Police to her injured owner after a car crash Monday night.
· Police had responded to reports of a dog on I-89 near the Vermont border.
· Tinsley, a German Shepherd, "is safe and well," the NHSP wrote on Facebook.
A German Shepherd named Tinsley led police officers to her owner who had been badly injured in a car crash on Monday night in Vermont.
New Hampshire State Police had responded to reports of a dog wandering on I-89 near the New Hampshire-Vermont border before learning of the crash, the police department wrote on Facebook.
Trooper Tom Sandberg and officers from the Lebanon Police Department located Tinsley on the highway. NHSP Lt. Dan Baldassarre told CNN the dog looked "skittish and scared" when they found her.
When officers approached the dog, she ran away from them, northbound on the interstate. The troopers then followed Tinsley across the Vermont border and came across a damaged guardrail, state police said on Facebook.
There, the troopers found a badly damaged pickup truck on the side of the road, and found both passengers thrown from the car, injured, and hypothermic, the Facebook post said.
At the scene, the troopers realized Tinsley's owner was one of the injured passengers.
"It quickly became apparent that Tinsley led Trooper Sandberg and the Lebanon Police to the crash site and injured occupants," the state police said.
Tinsley was not injured in the crash, according to NHSP.
Both passengers were taken to the hospital for treatment, CNN reported.
"She's my guardian angel," Tinsley's owner, Cam Laundry, told CNN affiliate WPTZ. "It's a miracle that she had that kind of intelligence to do what she did."
Laundry, who was driving the car, and his passenger, Justin Connors, are recovering from their injuries, Laundry told NECN.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dog-found-alone-highway-led-174311661.html
Another weekend and the northern hemisphere winter really sets in from Vancouver to Vladivostok. In much of continental Europe, soaring winter heating bills have become a severe challenge. Europe’s politicians are busy blaming Russia for Europe’s self-imposed winter heating crisis.
Now a global omicron surge is adding to supply chain disruption. Is 2022 to become a modern repeat of Europe 1848 but on a global scale? Have a great weekend everyone.
“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
Mark Twain.
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