Baltic Dry Index. 2068 +33 Brent Crude 108.63
Spot Gold 1974
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 14/04/22 World 502,141,484
Deaths 6,214,082
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Asia-Pacific stocks rise as investors react to monetary tightening in South Korea, Singapore
SINGAPORE — Shares in Asia-Pacific were higher in Thursday trade, as investors watched for market reaction following monetary policy tightening announced in South Korea and Singapore.
South Korea’s Kospi rose fractionally while the Straits Times index in Singapore advanced 0.12%.
The Bank of Korea announced Thursday a 25 basis points hike in its base rate to 1.5%, a decision predicted by less than half of the economists in a Reuters poll.
Following the decision, the Korean won traded at 1,224.14 per dollar, still stronger than levels above 1,232 seen against the greenback earlier this week.
In Southeast Asia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore on Thursday also announced a tightening of monetary policy, its third in the last six months.
The Singapore central bank said it will re-center the mid-point of the exchange rate policy band, referred to as the Singapore dollar nominal effective exchange rate (S$NEER), at its prevailing level. The rate of appreciation of the policy band will also “increase slightly.”
The width of the policy band was left unchanged. The MAS manages monetary policy through setting the exchange rate rather than interest rates.
The Singapore dollar strengthened to 1.3528 per dollar following the MAS announcement, as compared with levels above 1.364 seen earlier in the week against the greenback.
JPMorgan Asset Management said in a note that Singapore and South Korea, as net energy importers, “are not spared” from the effects of higher commodity price that were worsened by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“Even though the inflation issue is not as severe as it is in many parts of the developed world, it is understandable that both central banks are trying to make sure they act pre-emptively,” said Clara Cheong, global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.
----Mainland Chinese stocks rose in Thursday trade, with the Shanghai composite up 0.73% and the Shenzhen component climbing 0.44%.
China’s government announced Wednesday that reserve requirement ratio cuts will be used “at an appropriate time to raise the credit input capacity of banks,” citing details from a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.
That development comes as China has in recent weeks been battling its most severe Covid outbreak on the mainland since the initial phase of the pandemic in early 2020.
----In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index also gained 0.37%. Shares of CNOOC listed in the city rose 1.75%. Reuters reported Wednesday the Chinese oil firm is preparing to exit operations in multiple Western nations due to fears of sanctions.
Elsewhere, the Nikkei 225 in Japan climbed 1.1% while the Topix index advanced 0.79%.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.58%. Australia’s unemployment rate remained at 4% in March, according to official data released Thursday. That was slightly worse than expectations in a Reuters poll for a 3.9% unemployment rate.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan gained 0.42%. Markets in India are closed on Thursday for a holiday.
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Biden's approval craters at 33%: Just 26% of independents approve of his job in the White House, 39% back his handling of Ukraine and 68% says U.S. should be doing MORE to stop Putin's forces killing civilians in yet another shocking poll
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10716929/Bidens-approval-craters-33.html
Here’s the playbook if the rest of the world breaks free from the U.S. dollar, says Credit Suisse’s monetary plumbing guru
The World Health Organization on Wednesday said Covid-19 remains a global public health emergency despite the fact that deaths from the virus have fallen to their lowest level since the early days of the pandemic.
The world recorded more than 22,000 deaths from Covid during the week ended April 10, the lowest level since March 30, 2020, according to WHO data. The organization first declared Covid a global health emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, just over a month after the virus emerged in Wuhan, China.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said declining Covid deaths is good news, but some countries are still experiencing a spike in cases. Tedros said a WHO committee this week unanimously agreed that Covid remains a public health emergency.
“Far from being the time to drop our guard, this is the moment to work even harder to save lives,” Tedros said during a press briefing in Geneva. “Specifically, this means investing so that Covid-19 tools are equitably distributed, and we simultaneously strengthen health systems.”
The WHO has called for world leaders to ensure all nations vaccinate 70% of their populations against Covid by the middle of the year. However, 75 countries have vaccinated less than 40% of their populations and 21 nations have vaccinated less than 10% of their people as of March, according to the group.
Every region is reporting declining cases and deaths, according to the WHO’s latest epidemiological update. The world recorded 7.3 million new infections for the week ended April 10, a 24% decrease from the previous week and the lowest level since late December when the highly contagious omicron variant was sweeping the world.
However, the even more contagious omicron BA.2 subvariant has fueled renewed outbreaks in Europe and China, and increasingly, in the U.S. While Europe has largely emerged from its BA.2 wave, China is fighting its worst outbreak since 2020. China has placed most of Shanghai, involving about 25 million people, under lockdown.
The U.S. reported more than 30,000 new infections on Monday, a 20% increase over the previous week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, infections and hospitalizations are still more than 90% below the peak of the winter omicron wave in the U.S.
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More Taiwan firms suspend production in China as COVID spreads
April 13, 2022 7:04 AM GMT+1
TAIPEI, April 13 (Reuters) - More than 30 Taiwan companies, many making electronics parts, said on Wednesday that government COVID-19 control measures in eastern China had led them to suspend production until at least next week, as disruption from the measures spreads.
China has put Shanghai under a tight lockdown since late March and neighbouring Kunshan has also tightened curbs to control the country's biggest COVID-19 outbreak since the coronavirus was discovered in late 2019 in the city of Wuhan. read more
Global companies, from mobile phone to chip makers, are highly dependent on China and Southeast Asia for production and have been diversifying their supply chains after the pandemic caused havoc.
Among the Taiwan firms notifying the stock exchange was Quanta Computer Inc (2382.TW), an assembler of Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) MacBook, which said a Shanghai unit had suspended operations, with resumption depending on government approval.
It said it was in close touch with suppliers and assessing the financial impact.
Asia Electronic Material Co Ltd (4939.TWO), which makes parts for laptops, mobile phones and digital cameras, said its plant in Kunshan would be closed until next Tuesday, adding it was "hard to estimate" the financial impact.
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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, among other things, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
New transistor could cut 5% from world’s digital energy budget
Design also poised to save space, retain memory in event of power loss
Date: April 11, 2022
Source: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Summary: A new spin on one of the 20th century's smallest but grandest inventions, the transistor, could help feed the world's ever-growing appetite for digital memory while slicing up to 5% of the energy from its power-hungry diet.
Following years of innovations from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Christian Binek and University at Buffalo's Jonathan Bird and Keke He, the physicists recently teamed up to craft the first magneto-electric transistor.
Along with curbing the energy consumption of any microelectronics that incorporate it, the team's design could reduce the number of transistors needed to store certain data by as much as 75%, said Nebraska physicist Peter Dowben, leading to smaller devices. It could also lend those microelectronics steel-trap memory that remembers exactly where its users leave off, even after being shut down or abruptly losing power.
"The implications of this most recent demonstration are profound," said Dowben, who co-authored a recent paper on the work that graced the cover of the journal Advanced Materials.
Many millions of transistors line the surface of every modern integrated circuit, or microchip, which itself is manufactured in staggering numbers -- roughly 1 trillion in 2020 alone -- from the industry-favorite semiconducting material, silicon. By regulating the flow of electric current within a microchip, the tiny transistor effectively acts as a nanoscopic on-off switch that's essential to writing, reading and storing data as the 1s and 0s of digital technology.
But silicon-based microchips are nearing their practical limits, Dowben said. Those limits have the semiconductor industry investigating and funding every promising alternative it can.
"The traditional integrated circuit is facing some serious problems," said Dowben, Charles Bessey Professor of physics and astronomy at Nebraska. "There is a limit to how much smaller it can get. We're basically down to the range where we're talking about 25 or fewer silicon atoms wide. And you generate heat with every device on an (integrated circuit), so you can't any longer carry away enough heat to make everything work, either."
That predicament looms even as the demand for digital memory, and the energy needed to accommodate it, have soared amid the widespread adoption of computers, servers and the internet. The microchip-enabled smartening of TVs, vehicles and other technology has only increased that demand.
"We're getting to the point where we're going to approach the previous energy consumption of the United States just for memory (alone)," Dowben said. "And it doesn't stop.
"So you need something that you can shrink smaller, if possible. But above all, you need something that works differently than a silicon transistor, so that you can drop the power consumption, a lot."
'Now that it works, the fun begins'
Typical silicon-based transistors consist of multiple terminals. Two of them, called the source and drain, serve as the starting and end points for electrons flowing through a circuit. Above that channel sits another terminal, the gate. Applying voltage between the gate and source can dictate whether the electric current flows with low or high resistance, leading to either a buildup or absence of electron charges that gets encoded as a 1 or 0, respectively. But random-access memory -- the form that most computer applications rely on -- requires a constant supply of power just to maintain those binary states.
So rather than depend on electric charge as the basis of its approach, the team turned to spin: a magnetism-related property of electrons that points up or down and can be read, like electric charge can, as a 1 or 0. The team knew that electrons flowing through graphene, an ultra-robust material just one atom thick, can maintain their initial spin orientations for relatively long distances -- an appealing property for demonstrating the potential of a spintronic-based transistor. Actually controlling the orientation of those spins, using substantially less power than a conventional transistor, was a much more challenging prospect.
To do it, the researchers needed to underlay the graphene with the right material. Fortunately, Binek had already dedicated years to studying and modifying just such a material, chromium oxide. Crucially, chromium oxide is magneto-electric, meaning that the spins of the atoms at its surface can be flipped from up to down, or vice versa, by applying a meager amount of temporary, energy-sipping voltage.
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Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.
P.
J. O'Rourke.
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