With massive fiscal stimulus likely off the
agenda, another wave of near-free liquidity seemed inevitable.
Chinese blue chips gained 1.1%, aided by
talk a Biden White House might ease back on trade war tariffs.
E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 firmed
0.8% and NASDAQ futures 1.4%. EUROSTOXX 50 futures added 0.1% and FTSE futures
0.2%.
Both President Donald Trump and Biden have
paths to 270 Electoral College votes as states tallied mail-in ballots. Biden
remained optimistic on winning while the Republican incumbent filed lawsuits
and demanded recounts.
Betting sites swung toward Biden as the
results trickled in, having earlier heavily favoured Trump.
November
5, 2020
12:51 AM By Shu Zhang ,
Sonali
Paul
SINGAPORE/MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Oil dropped
on Thursday as Democrat Joe Biden edged closer to the White House in a
nail-biting U.S. presidential election but the Republicans look likely to
retain Senate control, decreasing the chances of any huge COVID-19 relief package.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude CLc1 LCOc1
Biden predicted a U.S. election win over
President Donald Trump after pivotal victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, while
the Republican incumbent sought to offset a narrowing path to re-election with
lawsuits and demands for a recount.
“The next few weeks could be quite
tumultuous with looming court challenges and recounts,” analysts at RBC Capital
Markets wrote in a note.
Current vote counting and trends suggest the
Republicans appeared poised to retain control of the U.S. Senate, while the
Democrats will hold a slimmed majority in the House of Representatives. A
divided Congress would likely prevent Biden from enacting major priorities like
fighting climate change or easing sanctions on oil producer Iran.
“Fortunately for oil markets, it would seem
any olive branch to Iran will not be extended anytime soon,” said Stephen
Innes, chief market strategist at Axi.
Under a Biden victory, RBC analysts
anticipate Iran being able to return around 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of
exports back to the market by the second half of 2021. S&P Global Platts
analysts do not expect a meaningful return of Iranian oil before 2022 under
either Trump or Biden.
At the same time, weakening demand in Europe continued to weigh on
sentiment, with average highway use in France, Italy and Spain dropping to its
lowest level since late June, ANZ Research said in a note.
“This is likely to put pressure on the OPEC+ alliance to delay its
planned rise in output in January,” ANZ Research said.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-oil/oil-down-over-1-as-markets-whipsawed-by-u-s-election-uncertainty-idUKKBN27L03J?il=0
In China v Australia trade war news, China is busy greatly
upping the ante. Furious that Australia called for an international enquiry
into how the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started in China.
China-Australia relations: ban on
US$400 million Australian wheat imports looms ·
Wheat exports from Australia are expected to
join a list that already contains barley, sugar, red wine, timber, coal,
lobster, copper ore and copper concentrates
·
The escalation in tensions between China and
Australia started after Canberra pushed for an international inquiry into the
origins of the coronavirus in April
Su-Lin Tan and William Zheng
Published: 10:45am, 3 Nov, 2020 Updated: 11:35pm, 3 Nov, 2020
China is expected to ban imports of Australian
wheat, putting a A$560 million (US$394 million) trade in doubt, with the grain
the latest to join a list of new blocks on Australian products, according to
industry sources.
From
Friday, barley, sugar, red wine, timber, coal, lobster, copper ore and copper
concentrates
from
Australia, are expected to be barred from China even
if the goods have been paid for and have arrived at ports. The ban on wheat is
likely to follow, although a date has not yet been set, sources said.
It is understood that Beijing will communicate the
bans to all Chinese state-owned and private traders by Tuesday. Traders who
have already been notified said no formal document was issued nor were reasons
provided.
The bans, though, came with a warning that Australian shipments
“Chinese importers have been told to obey these
rules strictly and suspend all orders for commercial reasons,” said a trade
source in China familiar with the impending ban, who wished to remain anonymous
due to the sensitivity of the issue.
“Shipments arriving at the port before Friday will
be released, but those arriving after will stay at port. It does not matter if
it is already in the bonded area.”
Chinese importers which have shipments of the first
seven banned goods arriving after Friday have been told that they will have to
bear the expense of any uncleared goods.
Alongside the new bans that were communicated
verbally to some traders on Monday, on Friday, China also suspended imports
from grain exporter Emerald Grain and ceased imports of Australian timber from
Queensland due to the discovery of pests and other contamination.
This follows earlier rounds of Chinese
trade actions, including anti-dumping duties on Australian barley,
The escalation in tensions between China
and Australia – that has shown no signs of abating after seven months – started
after Canberra pushed for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus
More
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3108176/china-australia-relations-ban-us400-million-australian-wheat?utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_campaign=enlz-gme_trade_war&utm_content=20201103&tpcc=enlz-us_china_trade_war&MCUID=7c9a8b8fe6&MCCampaignID=07cfa55622&MCAccountID=7b1e9e7f8075914aba9cff17f&tc=13
Winter
Watch.
The Arctic winter sea-ice expansion and
northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid-October, the northern
hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually
expands back towards its winter maximum.
Over simplified, a rapid expansion of
both, especially if early, can be a sign of a harsher than normal arriving northern
hemisphere winter. Perhaps more so in 2020-2021 as we’re in the low of the
ending sunspot cycle, which possibly also influenced this year’s record
Atlantic hurricane season.
Adding to this year’s winter concerns,
a developing La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific. While the La Nina effect
on the winter weather of western Europe is weaker than that of an El Nino
pattern, which tends to make for a milder winter, a La Nina pattern tends to
make for a colder winter.
The early take, Eur-Asia turned snowy
fast in mid-October. The Arctic sea ice
expansion is slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with
the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation will probably now speed up.
Which now seems to be happening in the Kara and Laptev Seas.
It is still too early to suggest a mild
western European winter ahead, but it is the way I’m leaning given the slowish
recovery of the Arctic sea ice.
US National Ice
Center.
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/ims/
Gold would have value if for no other reason than that it
enables a citizen to fashion his financial escape from the state.
William F. Rickenbacker
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Pandemic Accelerates With Record
Daily Death Toll: Virus Update Bloomberg News November
4, 2020, 10:56 PM GMT Updated on November 5, 2020, 3:53 AM GMT
Coronavirus deaths and new infections worldwide surged by
daily records, almost one year after the disease emerged, according to data
from Johns Hopkins University.
The virus continued to rage in America as Wisconsin
reported record cases and said hospitals are at or near capacity. Daily
infections reached a five-month high in New Jersey, and Texas had the most new
cases since August.
In Europe, Greece is nearing a lockdown and Italy enacted curbs in Milan and Turin. Belgium
reported record hospital admissions, and Austrian infections hit a daily high.
A new strain of Covid-19 emerged after
an outbreak in Denmark’s mink population, potentially hampering efforts to
develop a vaccine.
Key
Developments: More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-04/texas-daily-cases-soar-australia-in-vaccine-pacts-virus-update?srnd=coronavirus
U.S. adds more than 100,000
COVID-19 cases in a single day for the first time Nov. 4, 2020 /
11:42 AM / Updated Nov. 4, 2020 at 10:22 PM
Nov.
4 (UPI) -- The United States has added more than
100,000 new COVID-19
in a single day for the first time, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The tracking effort listed 103,087 new cases nationwide on
Wednesday, the highest one-day total since the pandemic began. The second-highest
was last Friday when 99,000 were added.
Over the past seven days, there have been more than 600,000
new cases, according to Johns Hopkins
Also Tuesday, there were about 1,100 new
coronavirus-related deaths, the highest toll since Sept. 23.
Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 9.39
million cases and 230,000 deaths in the United States.
Hospitalizations nationwide are on the rise and have
surpassed 50,000 for the first time, including 10,000 in intensive care,
according to the COVID
Tracking Project
Admissions are up sharply in the Midwest, where 238 per
million residents are hospitalized, the researchers said.
Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota
and New Mexico all reported
More
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/11/04/US-adds-more-than-100000-COVID-19-cases-in-a-single-day-for-the-first-time/8661604498782/
France registers over 40,000 new
COVID-19 cases, warns of under-reporting November 4, 2020
8:15 PM
PARIS (Reuters) - France registered 40,558 new coronavirus cases on
Wednesday, compared with 36,330 on Tuesday and a record of 52,518 on Monday,
health ministry data showed.
The total number of cases increased to 1,543,321 but the ministry added
that the number of new cases reported on Wednesday was a minimum number that
could increase due to problems with data gathering.
The ministry also reported that the number of people who have died from
the virus increased by 385 to 38,674, compared with 854 on Tuesday but those
numbers included a multi-day batch of 428 deaths in retirement homes. The
ministry said there were 394 new deaths in hospitals over the past 24 hours.
The highest number of COVID-19 deaths reported per day - in hospitals
and retirement homes - since the start of the epidemic was 1,438 on April 15.
The seven-day moving average of deaths increased to 413 from 393 on Tuesday.
The number of people in intensive care with the virus increased by 211
to 4,089, the first time this tally was over 4,000 since April 30. At the
height of the outbreak, on April 8, a record 7,148 COVID-19 patients were in
ICU.
The number of people in hospital with the virus rose by 1,269 to 27,534,
about 5,000 below the 32,292 high set in the spring.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-france-casualties/france-registers-over-40000-new-covid-19-cases-warns-of-under-reporting-idUKKBN27K2MT
Lung damage found in COVID dead
may shed light on 'long COVID' - study November 4, 2020
12:09 AM By Kate
Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - A study of the lungs of
people who have died from COVID-19 has found persistent and extensive lung
damage in most cases and may help doctors understand what is behind a syndrome
known as ‘long COVID’, in which patients suffer ongoing symptoms for months.
Scientists leading the research said they
also found some unique characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes
COVID-19, which may explain why it is able to inflict such harm.
“The findings indicate that COVID-19 is not
simply a disease caused by the death of virus-infected cells, but is likely the
consequence of these abnormal cells persisting for long periods inside the
lungs,” said Mauro Giacca, a professor at King’s College London who co-led the
work.
The research team analysed samples of tissue
from the lungs, heart, liver and kidneys of 41 patients who died of COVID-19 at
Italy’s University Hospital of Trieste between February and April 2020.
In a telephone interview, Giacca said that,
while his research team found no overt signs of viral infection or prolonged
inflammation in other organs, they discovered “really vast destruction of the
architecture of the lungs”, with healthy tissue “almost completely substituted
by scar tissue”.
“MASSIVE” DAMAGE
“It could very well be envisaged that one of
the reasons why there are cases of long COVID is because there is vast
destruction of lung (tissue),” he told Reuters. “Even if someone recovers from
COVID, the damage that is done could be massive.”
Growing evidence from around the world
suggests that a small proportion of people who have had COVID-19 and recovered
from their initial infection can experience a range of ongoing symptoms
including fatigue, brain fog and shortness of breath. The condition is often
called “long COVID”.
Giacca said almost 90% of the 41 patients
had several characteristics unique to COVID-19 compared to other forms of
pneumonia.
One was that patients had extensive blood
clotting of the lung arteries and veins. Another was that some lung cells were
abnormally large and had many nuclei - a result of the fusion of different
cells into single large cells in a process known as syncytia.
The research, published in the journal
Lancet eBioMedicine, also found the virus itself was still present in many
types of cells.
“The presence of these infected cells can
cause the major structural changes observed in lungs, which can persist for
several weeks or months and could eventually explain ‘long COVID’,” Giacca
said.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-lungs/lung-damage-found-in-covid-dead-may-shed-light-on-long-covid-study-idUKKBN27K008?feedType=mktg&feedName=uktechnology&WT.mc_id=Newsletter-UK&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018%20Template:%20UK%20TECHNOLOGY%20ROUNDUP%202020-11-04&utm_term=NEW:%20UK%20Technology%20Roundup
Oxford COVID-19 vaccine results
due next month, raising hopes of 2021 rollout November 4, 2020
10:35 AM By Alistair Smout , Guy
Faulconbridge
LONDON
(Reuters) - The University of Oxford hopes to present late-stage trial results
on its COVID-19 vaccine candidate this year, raising hopes that Britain could
start to roll out a successful vaccine in late December or early 2021.
A vaccine that works is seen as a game-changer in the battle against the
coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide, shuttered
swathes of the global economy and turned normal life upside down for billions
of people.
“I’m optimistic that we could reach that point before the end of this
year,” Oxford Vaccine Trial Chief Investigator Andrew Pollard told British
lawmakers of presenting trial results this year.
Pollard said working out whether or not the vaccine worked would likely
come this year, after which the data would have to be carefully reviewed by
regulators and then a political decision made on who should get the vaccine.
“Our bit - we are getting closer to but we are not there yet,” Pollard,
director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said.
Asked if he expected the vaccine would start to be deployed before
Christmas, he said: “There is a small chance of that being possible but I just
don’t know.”
The Oxford/AstraZeneca AZN.L vaccine is expected to
be one of the first from big pharma to be submitted for regulatory approval,
along with Pfizer PFE.N
and BioNTech's 22UAy.F
candidate.
“If I put on my rose-tinted specs, I would
hope that we will see positive interim data from both Oxford and from
Pfizer/BioNTech in early December and if we get that then I think we have got
the possibility of deploying by the year end,” Kate Bingham, the chair of the
UK Vaccine Taskforce, told lawmakers.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there was
the prospect of a vaccine in the first quarter of 2021.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-vaccine/oxford-covid-19-vaccine-results-due-next-month-raising-hopes-of-2021-rollout-idUKKBN27K1CS?il=0
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
Stanford
Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
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/
Covid19info.live
https://wuflu.live/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC
energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
Room temperature conversion of
CO2 to CO: A new way to synthesize hydrocarbons New method could
potentially reduce dioxide emission into the atmosphere and slash costs of
chemical manufacturing Date:
November 2, 2020
Source:
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Summary:
Researchers have demonstrated a room-temperature method that could
significantly reduce carbon dioxide levels in fossil-fuel power plant exhaust,
one of the main sources of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
and their colleagues have demonstrated a room-temperature method that could
significantly reduce carbon dioxide levels in fossil-fuel power plant exhaust,
one of the main sources of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
Although the researchers demonstrated this method in a small-scale,
highly controlled environment with dimensions of just nanometers (billionths of
a meter), they have already come up with concepts for scaling up the method and
making it practical for real-world applications.
In addition to offering a potential new way of mitigating the effects of
climate change, the chemical process employed by the scientists also could
reduce costs and energy requirements for producing liquid hydrocarbons and
other chemicals used by industry. That's because the method's byproducts
include the building blocks for synthesizing methane, ethanol and other
carbon-based compounds used in industrial processing.
The team tapped a novel energy source from the nanoworld to trigger a
run-of-the-mill chemical reaction that eliminates carbon dioxide. In this
reaction, solid carbon latches onto one of the oxygen atoms in carbon dioxide
gas, reducing it to carbon monoxide. The conversion normally requires
significant amounts of energy in the form of high heat -- a temperature of at
least 700 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt aluminum at normal atmospheric
pressure.
Instead of heat, the team relied on the energy harvested from traveling
waves of electrons, known as localized surface plasmons (LSPs), which surf on
individual aluminum nanoparticles. The team triggered the LSP oscillations by
exciting the nanoparticles with an electron beam that had an adjustable diameter.
A narrow beam, about a nanometer in diameter, bombarded individual aluminum
nanoparticles while a beam about a thousand times wider generated LSPs among a
large set of the nanoparticles.
In the team's experiment, the aluminum nanoparticles were deposited on a
layer of graphite, a form of carbon. This allowed the nanoparticles to transfer
the LSP energy to the graphite. In the presence of carbon dioxide gas, which
the team injected into the system, the graphite served the role of plucking
individual oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide, reducing it to carbon monoxide.
The aluminum nanoparticles were kept at room temperature. In this way, the team
accomplished a major feat: getting rid of the carbon dioxide without the need
for a source of high heat.
Previous methods of removing carbon dioxide have had limited success
because the techniques have required high temperature or pressure, employed
costly precious metals, or had poor efficiency. In contrast, the LSP method not
only saves energy but uses aluminum, a cheap and abundant metal.
More
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201102120048.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
We have gold because we cannot trust
governments.
Herbert Hoover
