Baltic Dry Index. 2076 -111 Brent Crude 103.15
Spot Gold 1909
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 28/02/22 World 435,993,305
Deaths 5,968,034
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
Ernest Hemingway.
It is day 5 of the unnecessary European war in Ukraine. All that was needed to avoid this war was a commitment by President Biden and NATO not to admit Ukraine into NATO. Instead both did exactly the opposite. But you won’t find my unpopular conclusion in mainstream media.
From Russia’s perspective, Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat only offsetable by a nuclear response in Russia’s back yard.
And so we enter day 5 of an entirely avoidable European war that has already destroyed Ukraine’s economy, sent about half a million Ukrainian refugees into Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. If the war continues, the EU estimates there will be between a million and two million refugees by the weekend.
The war has sent the price of oil, gold and grains soaring, with much more likely to come even if today’s “peace meeting” between Russia and Ukraine turns out to be an unlikely success.
It is hard to see Ukraine producing or exporting much wheat, maize [corn,] barley or sunflower oil in 2022.
It is hard to see Ukraine getting pork production and distribution back to normality this year.
The new weekend sanctions on Russia make for a very iffy oil and natural gas supply chain even if Russia doesn’t want to retaliate.
With much higher US and global inflation likely to come, this week’s testimony by Fed Chairman Powell becomes more critical than normal.
Are the Fed now forced to take no action on inflation due to the new war?
Or, despite the new war and its inflationary impact, dare the Fed meaningfully start raising interest rates anyway, lest gold take-off like 1979?
Below, the stock casino futures markets anticipate a most difficult day.
European markets set to plummet at the open as new sanctions are imposed on Russia
LONDON — European stocks are expected to open sharply lower on Monday as global markets track developments in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
The U.K.’s FTSE index is seen opening 117 points lower at 7,370, Germany’s DAX 538 points lower at 14,007, France’s CAC 40 down 228 points at 6,521 and Italy’s FTSE MIB 968 points lower t 24,761, according to IG.
The Russian advance into Ukraine has continued throughout the weekend. Russian military vehicles entered Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv, with reports of fighting taking place and residents being warned to stay in shelters.
More sanctions have been imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, with the U.S., Europe and Canada agreeing Saturday to remove key Russian banks from the interbank messaging system, SWIFT. The U.K. and EU have also closed their airspace to Russian aircraft.
Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country’s nuclear deterrence forces on high alert Sunday amid a growing global backlash against the invasion. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said representatives for Ukraine and Russia have agreed to meet on the Ukraine-Belarus border “with no preconditions.”
U.S. stock futures moved lower in overnight trading on Sunday as investors grew concerned about the economic ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, meanwhile shares in Asia-Pacific were mixed on Monday. Oil futures were up more than 5% and the Russian ruble dived around 29% against the dollar on Monday morning, as markets assessed the impact of sanctions on Russia.
Earnings come from Atos, Signify and GSK on Monday with data releases including preliminary inflation data from Spain and Portugal for February.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/28/european-markets-react-as-new-sanctions-are-imposed-on-russia.html
Dow futures fall about 500 points as traders assess ripple effects of Russia sanctions
U.S. stock futures moved lower in overnight trading on Sunday as investors grew concerned about the economic ramifications of the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.
Dow futures dropped 539 points. S&P 500 futures fell 2.41% and Nasdaq 100 futures lost 2.58%.
U.S. and global equities experienced volatile trading last week as geopolitical tensions between Russia and Ukraine escalated. Early Thursday morning local time, Moscow launched military action in Ukraine.
Throughout the weekend, the Russian advance into Ukraine continued. Russian military vehicles entered Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv with reports of fighting taking place and residents being warned to stay in shelters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country’s nuclear deterrence forces on high alert Sunday amid a growing global backlash against the invasion. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said representatives for Ukraine and Russia have agreed to meet on the Ukraine-Belarus border “with no preconditions.”
----Last week, President Joe Biden reacted to the attack by announcing several rounds of sanctions on Russian banks, on the country’s sovereign debt and Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The U.S., European allies and Canada agreed Saturday to remove key Russian banks from the interbank messaging system, SWIFT.
“Some Russian banks being removed from SWIFT (energy transactions exempt) and the freezing of the Russian central bank’s access to its foreign currency reserves held in the West clearly increases economic tail risk,” said Dennis DeBusschere of 22V Research.
However, he believes Russia can still sell oil and there could be “loop holes” in Russia’s frozen assets, which “might limit the disaster in markets for a few days.”
“Traders will be watching for any signs of resolution on the Russian crisis (negotiated peace or a signs of a near-term victory for either side) or for signs tensions could be worsening raising the chance of a world war involving NATO members,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist for the Leuthold Group. “As news trickles out supporting either thesis, expect daily stock market action to remain volatile.”
Despite the market volatility, the Dow experienced its best day since November 2020 on Friday.
Last week, the Dow notched its third week of losses. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq ended the week in green, rising 0.8% and 1.1%, respectively.
The Nasdaq Composite is still in correction, about 15% from its record close. The Dow and S&P 500 are just outside of correction territory.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies before Congress twice in the coming week, and he will be followed closely for any signal on whether geopolitical events are likely to impact Fed rate hikes.
Investors will also get a update on the labor department later in the week as the February jobs report is expected Friday. In January, 467,000 payrolls were added.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/27/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html
Russian central bank orders block on foreign clients' bids to sell Russian securities – document
Sun, February 27, 2022, 10:06 PM
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia's central bank has ordered professional stock market participants to suspend the execution of all orders by foreign legal entities and individuals to sell Russian securities from Monday morning, an internal document showed.
The document was published by ACI Russia, the national organisation of Russian financial market specialists.
The bank's media relations department did not respond to a Reuters request to confirm the authenticity of the document.
Two financial market sources confirmed to Reuters that the document had been sent to brokers by the central bank.
It said the measures were being taken by the regulator "in connection with the current crisis in the financial market and in order to ensure the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of investors in financial markets".
The central bank order is valid from 7:00 a.m. (0400 GMT) on Feb. 28 until the "cancellation of this order".
The document does not specify whether it applies to government securities. The order does not apply to applications submitted before 7 a.m. Monday.
The document was signed by central bank deputy chairman Philip Gabunia.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-central-bank-orders-block-220631301.html
If we don't end war, war will end us.
H. G. Wells.
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
New outbreaks of bird flu detected in Michigan, Delaware, Maine
By TZVI JOFFRE Published: FEBRUARY 27, 2022 03:49
New cases of Eurasian H5 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) were detected in domestic flocks in Michigan, Maine and Delaware in recent days, as the bird flu continues to spread in North America and around the world.
On Thursday, an outbreak of HPAI was confirmed by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) in a non-commercial backyard flock in Kalamazoo Country, Michigan. Several birds in the flock died and others showed signs of illness before the outbreak was confirmed.
“MDARD is always preparing for situations like this when they arise, which is why we were able to take quick action to contain this disease and help protect against its spread,” said MDARD Director Gary McDowell. “At this time, this is an isolated case. There is no threat to public health or food safety. We do not anticipate any disruptions to supply chains across our state. As this situation develops, we will continue to work with our partners at local and federal levels to best mitigate spread and provide outreach."
The birds in the affected flock have been euthanized and the premises is under quarantine. State health officials called on poultry owners to increase biosecurity measures and keep wild birds away from their flocks.
In New Castle County, Delaware, an outbreak of HPAI was confirmed in a commercial poultry flock.
Two outbreaks of avian influenza have been confirmed in the past week in domestic flocks in Maine, as well. One outbreak was detected in Knox County, while another outbreak was detected shortly afterwards in a flock located about three kilometers away.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) stated that it is working closely with state animal health officials on a joint incident response.
The first confirmed case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in a US commercial flock since 2020 was detected in a turkey flock in Indiana earlier this month. The flock was infected with the H5N1 subtype, the same strain detected in mid-January in wild birds in North Carolina when the first cases of HPAI this season were detected in the States.
The first case of H5N1 in North America this season was detected in Newfoundland and Labrador in late December. Since then, the virus has spread to other locations in Canada and the US.
As of Saturday, nearly 300 wild birds in South and North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, Alabama, Kentucky, Maine, New Jersey and Florida had been found to be infected with Eurasian H5 HPAI, with a number of cases specified as H5N1.
On Tuesday, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stressed that the current risk to the general public's health from HPAI in the US is low, adding that those who are exposed more to birds, such as poultry workers, may have a higher risk of infection.
----A large number of bird flu outbreaks have been reported throughout Europe, Africa and Asia in recent weeks and months, mostly due to the H5N1 subtype, which comes from the H5 lineage, according to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). The organization warned that a further increase in outbreaks is expected in the coming months.
----14 million cases of avian influenza were reported in birds in 2021, more than the previous five years combined, according to figures obtained from the OIE by The Telegraph. 61.4 million birds died either due to the virus or of being culled to prevent its spread.
Scientists warned in The Telegraph report that the increase in outbreaks could help the virus evolve to spread between humans.
More
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-698760
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Today,
will we ever get to a “universal” SARs-CoV-2 “vaccine”? Or rather a treatment
rather than “vaccine” that stops you catching SARs-CoV-2 again and again.
Finally some uncommon common sense starts to return, just don’t tell anyone in Ottawa.
Will we get a single, variant-proof vaccine for Covid?
The goal of a universal vaccine would have seemed a fantasy only a few years ago. But not now…
This week the government announced additional vaccine booster jabs for the over-75s and suggested a further shot is likely to be needed in the autumn. But imagine if the next Covid vaccine jab you have were the last you would ever need. That’s a dream being actively pursued now by researchers, who feel it could be possible to make a “universal” vaccine against the Sars-CoV-2 virus that would work well not only against all existing variants but any that the virus could plausibly mutate into in the future.
Some are thinking even bigger. In January, Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, and two other experts called for more research into “universal coronavirus vaccines” that would work not only against Sars-CoV-2 but against the many other coronaviruses in animal populations that have the potential to spill over into humans and cause future pandemics. “We need a research approach that can characterise the global ‘coronaviral universe’ in multiple species,” Fauci and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “and apply this information in developing broadly protective ‘universal’ vaccines against all [coronaviruses].”
Is that just a fantasy? Not necessarily. After all, many considered it fanciful, when the pandemic began, that we’d have a vaccine against Covid-19 in less than a year. But experience has proved that “we as a research community can pull together and do remarkable things,” says Larry Corey, a virologist and vaccine expert at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The current vaccines were developed against the original “ancestral” variant of Sars-CoV-2. They still work remarkably well against the new variants in preventing severe disease – Corey says that even against Delta there seems to be about a 90-fold difference in the death rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. But the Omicron variant has caused alarm by its ability to transmit faster than the others and to infect vaccinated people. Although very few such individuals develop serious symptoms from Omicron, it can actively suppress the immune defences that vaccination (as well as natural infection) activate.
----At the moment we have no pan-variant vaccine for any endemic virus. Researchers have long dreamed of a universal vaccine that would make flu epidemics less lethal, and there are now promising signs that it could be possible. The design principle for a universal Covid vaccine would follow similar lines.
One option might be to prime the immune system to recognise not just one bit of a viral protein, but lots of bits – not all of which are likely to change (or change significantly) at once in any new variant. We’d give the immune system many different ways to spot, and then suppress, the invader, in the hope that one will work. This might involve, for example, making an mRNA vaccine that contains many different RNA molecules, each encoding as a different protein fragment. Or a single particle in the vaccine could hold several different fragments.
Alternatively, you can look for parts of the virus that seem to be “conserved” across variants: proteins (or bits of them) that don’t mutate much at all, presumably because such changes would be too detrimental to the virus. But how can you know what those will be, even for variants that haven’t emerged yet? One way is to see if highly conserved protein regions exist already among a whole family of related coronaviruses. “If you can find things that are in common between Sars-CoV-2, Sars [the related respiratory virus that caused alarm in 2003], and a bunch of other animal coronaviruses, then the likelihood is that the next variant of Sars-CoV-2 will have them too,” says Skip Virgin, chief scientific officer of San Francisco-based Vir Biotechnologies, which is working with GlaxoSmithKline on vaccine development – a collaboration that has already produced the monoclonal antibody sotrovimab for alleviating Covid symptoms.
More
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/26/will-we-get-a-single-variant-proof-vaccine-for-covid
New York City to lift vaccination mandate for businesses, events
Mask rules for city schools were likely to end the same day, March 7, Mayor Eric Adams said. Masks are optional at Tuesday’s State of the Union address in Washington.
Feb. 27, 2022, 10:35 PM GMT
New York City, the first U.S. metropolis to require vaccinations indoors, will lift its mandate for indoor businesses, dining and events in the coming days.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Sunday that his administration would end its vaccination mandate requirements on March 7 as long as Covid-19 case numbers continue to trend downward. He joins public officials who made similar decisions in cities such as Seattle and Boston in recent weeks.
The indoor mask mandate will also be lifted in public schools the same day provided no unexpected spikes arise, Adams said.
He noted that more than a million students return to public schools Monday after the midwinter break. A week of commingling on campuses without "unforeseen spikes" in case numbers would confirm the end of mandatory masks for school facilities for now, he said in a statement Sunday.
“New York City’s numbers continue to go down day after day, so, as long as COVID indicators show a low level of risk and we see no surprises this week, on Monday, March 7 we will also lift Key2NYC requirements," Adams announced. "This will give business owners the time to adapt and will allow us to ensure we are making the best public health decisions for the people of New York."
The news came as the U.S. House sergeant-at-arms said masks are "now an individual choice" for people attending Tuesday's State of the Union address in the House chamber in Washington. Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the attending physician of Congress, wrote in a coronavirus update Sunday that Washington's relatively low level of transmission triggered the change to optional mask-wearing at the Capitol.
New York City's mandate, which was first announced in August, requires patrons to show proof of vaccination.
Although it is not always enforced, the vaccination requirement applies to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, coffee shops, fast food eateries, indoor fitness locations, movie theaters, music and concert venues, museums, sports arenas and stadiums, theaters and billiard halls, among other places.
More
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-city-lifts-vaccine-mandate-businesses-events-rcna17415
Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada.
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.
2D material in three dimensions
Date: January 31, 2022
Source: Vienna University of Technology
Summary: For years, scientists have tried to develop 2D-materials such as graphene, which consists of only one layer of carbon atoms. But what if you need to fit as much graphene as possible into a limited space? Then the graphene layer has to be turned into a complex 3d shape.
The carbon material graphene has no well-defined thickness, it merely consists of one single layer of atoms. It is therefore often referred to as a "two-dimensional material." Trying to make a three-dimensional structure out of it may sound contradictory at first, but it is an important goal: if the properties of the graphene layer are to be exploited best, then as much active surface area as possible must be integrated within a limited volume.
The best way to achieve this goal is to produce graphene on complex branched nanostructures. This is exactly what a cooperation between CNR Nano in Pisa, TU Wien (Vienna) and the University of Antwerp has now achieved. This could help, for example, to increase the storage capability per volume for hydrogen or to build chemical sensors with higher sensitivity.
From solid to porous
In Prof. Ulrich Schmid's group (Institute for Sensor and Actuator Systems, TU Wien), research has been conducted for years on how to transform solid materials such as silicon carbide into extremely fine, porous structures in a precisely controlled way. "If you can control the porosity, then many different material properties can be influenced as a result," explains Georg Pfusterschmied, one of the authors of the current paper.
The technological procedures required to achieve this goal are challenging: "It is an electrochemical process that consists of several steps," says Markus Leitgeb, a chemist who also works in Ulrich Schmid's research group at TU Wien. "We work with very specific etching solutions, and apply tailored electric current characteristics in combination with UV irradiation." This allows to etch tiny holes and channels into certain materials.
Because of this expertise in the realization of porous structures, Stefan Heun's team from the Nanoscience Institute of the Italian National Research Council CNR turned to their colleagues at TU Wien. The Pisa team was looking for a method to produce graphene surfaces in branched nanostructures to enable larger graphene surface areas. And the technology developed at TU Wien is perfectly suited for this task.
----An electrochemical etching process was therefore developed at TU Wien that turns solid silicon carbide into the desired porous nanostructure. About 42 % of the volume is removed in this process. The remaining nanostructure was then heated in high vacuum in Pisa so that graphene formed on the surface. The result was then examined in detail in Antwerp. This revealed the success of the new process: indeed, a large number of graphene flakes form on the intricately shaped surface of the 3D nanostructure.
A lot of surface area in a compact form
"This allows us to use the advantages of graphene much more effectively," says Ulrich Schmid. "The original motivation for the research project was to store hydrogen: you can temporarily store hydrogen atoms on graphene surfaces and then use them for various processes. The larger the surface, the larger the amount of hydrogen you can store." But there are also many other ideas for using such 3D graphene structures. A large surface area is also a decisive advantage in chemical sensors, which, for example, can be used to detect rare substances in gases.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert
Einstein.
