Home » Posts tagged 'viral pandemic' (Page 4)
Tag Archives: viral pandemic
D614G: A New, More Serious Covid-19 Mutation To Worry AboutW
D614G: A New, More Serious Covid-19 Mutation To Worry About
We’re not done with the honey badger virus by a long shot.
Continuing its Keystone Cops manner of dealing with covid-19, the US appears to be caught flat-footed by the resurgence of infections happening across many southern and western states right now.
Yes, people are tired of being cooped indoors and wearing masks. Summer is here and they want to get outside, spend time with loved ones, and get back some normalcy of life.
But the Honey Badger virus ‘don’t care’. Covid-19 sees our loosening restrictions as a welcome invitation and is burrowing in with enthusiasm.
Making matters worse for us human hosts, a new strain of the virus — the D614G mutation — has been identified. It appears to be more contagious and serious than most previous strains.
So, for those who do not want to catch covid-19, now is not the time to start letting down your guard. We are not through the woods by a long shot yet:
Curing COVID-19 Won’t Cure the Economy
Curing COVID-19 Won’t Cure the Economy
We have been making the case for weeks that we aren’t heading for a quick recovery. We’ve reported on the number of people of small business owners who don’t think they’ll survive, the increasing number of over-leveraged zombie companies, and the tsunami of defaults and bankruptcies on the horizon. Yes, we have seen some economic numbers that are better than expected, but it’s all a function of a Federal Reserve-induced sugar high. The ugly truth is that given the amount of stimulus that the Federal Reserve and the US government have pumped into the economy, unwinding it all will be mission impossible. All of this certainly raises serious questions about the possibility of a “v-shaped” recovery.
We’re not alone in making this case. In the following article recently published at the Mises Wire, economist Brendan Brown provides some additional arguments and asserts that even if COVID-19 disappeared today, the economy isn’t going back to “normal.”
The opinions expressed are those of Brendan Brown and for your consideration. They do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.
Speculative frenzy in the midst of recession is not a new phenomenon. Yet the extent of the “madness” this time might well beat records in the small sample size available from the history laboratory. The combination of extreme monetary radicalism and a receding supply shock has proved to be a potent toxic, impairing mental processes in ways described by the behavioral finance theorists. The pandemic stock “bubble” and resumed hectic demand for risky credit paper provide illustrations.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What’s Next For Big Oil?
What’s Next For Big Oil?
- The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant role to play in Big Oil’s shift towards cleaner energy.
- Three of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies are planning to become net-zero carbon emitters by 2050.
- Tech will not only help Big Oil become more efficient–it may turn out to be instrumental for their net-zero ambitions.
Something unthinkable is happening in Big Oil, and it’s not the demand slump or the spending cuts or the layoffs. With the exception of the demand slump, we’ve seen all this before–more than once, in fact. No, what’s unthinkable is that Big Oil appears to be planning to stop being Big Oil.
It’s not a joke. Three of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies are planning to become net-zero carbon emitters by 2050. And, as Energy Intelligence noted recently in an industry analysis, there are only two ways to attain the net-zero state: reduce the production of oil and gas, and capture the already emitted carbon dioxide.
The three top performers in the field seem to be focusing on the first way. Shell, BP, and Total—along with Italy’s Eni and Spain’s Repsol—all plan to boost their output of renewable energy at the expense of oil significantly over the next few decades. And the U.S. supermajors, as reluctant as they have been to join the green wave in energy, might at some point simply be forced to do it by their shareholders and by the new, post-coronavirus world order.
It would be an understatement to say that the pandemic had some role to play in the transformation looming over the energy industry as we know it. The pandemic, and the oil demand slump it brought on the industry, had a significant role to play in that transformation. The extent and speed of this demand slump were literally unprecedented, but now that the precedent has been set, Big Oil is preparing for the future.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
American Exceptionalism Is on the Ropes and the End of the Petrodollar Is Nigh
American Exceptionalism Is on the Ropes and the End of the Petrodollar Is Nigh
From the border wall rhetoric to trade wars, Trump is effectively setting up the implosion of the dollar and couching it as pseudo nationalistic populism.
The pressure on the global economy imposed by the measures to curb the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to erode whatever confidence the world still has in the U.S. dollar as a viable reserve currency. A shortfall in U.S. domestic savings, dropping to 1.4 percent of national income, brought on by the drawn-out shutdowns and structural changes to the ways of doing business, such as the phasing out of brick-and-mortar business establishments and the substitution of human labor with robotics, may be the canary in the coal mine of the upcoming economic paradigm shift.
Among the visible signs that a global monetary reset is in the offing is the state of currency speculation markets, which are progressively moving away from the dollar as illustrated by the $1.5 billion slash in short positions in the previous week, the largest in six weeks. A more inconspicuous red flag might be the decreasing power of the U.S. Federal Reserve to affect markets as it has over its relatively short existence with a mere word here or the moving of an interest rate point there.
Just five days ago, Fed chair Jerome Powell declared in a press conference that the U.S. banking system was “so much better capitalized, so much stronger, better aware of its risks, better at managing its risks, [and] more highly liquid…”, that it represented a “source of strength” in this environment of widespread economic pain. In former years, just these words from the head of the U.S. central bank would have been enough to shore up any misgivings by market participants. But exactly the opposite occurred.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Weekly Commentary: Update COVID-19
Weekly Commentary: Update COVID-19
Can we even attempt a reasonable discussion? Someone’s got this wrong.
June 12 – Reuters (Judy Hua, Cate Cadell, Winni Zhou and Andrew Galbraith): “A Beijing district put itself on a ‘wartime’ footing and the capital banned tourism and sports events on Saturday after a cluster of novel coronavirus infections centred around a major wholesale market sparked fears of a new wave of COVID-19… ‘In accordance with the principle of putting the safety of the masses and health first, we have adopted lockdown measures for the Xinfadi market and surrounding neighbourhoods,’ Chu said.”
June 14 – Financial Times (Don Weinland): “Over the weekend, authorities closed the Xinfadi market, a sprawling complex that provides most of Beijing’s fresh seafood, fruits and vegetables. Several residential compounds on the west side of the city have been locked down and more than 100 people have been put in quarantine… China has adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ stance toward new cases. Areas that present any new cases have been quickly locked down, often trapping millions of people.”
June 19 – CNN (Nectar Gan): “Within a matter of days, the metropolis of more than 20 million people was placed under a partial lockdown. Authorities reintroduced restrictive measures used earlier to fight the initial wave of infections, sealing off residential neighborhoods, closing schools and barring hundreds of thousands of people deemed at risk of contracting the virus from leaving the city.”
China is said to have mobilized its 100,000-strong infection tracing force. More than 1.1 million tests were administered in Beijing over the past week. From the UK Guardian (Lily Kuo): “Officials have ordered all residents to avoid non-essential travel outside of the capital, and suspended hundreds of flights and all long-distance buses. Other cities and provinces have begun to impose quarantine measures on travellers from Beijing… ‘Everyone is scared. No one wanted this to happen,’ says Zhang, waiting in the queue near Chaoyang park.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19
Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19
Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper, “depicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in a straight line.”
The capitalists who printed that picture wanted people to think Soviet children were “treated like prisoners,” the teacher declared angrily, “when in reality the kids were on their way to a swimming pool in their bathrobes.”
Which was a nice story (thought little Katya) — except that “I had never even seen a pool…. [T]hey existed in my mind as does an exotic animal or an unvisited city.”
A time capsule from a remote dystopia? Think again.
Staring at me right now from the latest quarterly newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is an identical piece of bad-is-good fakery: a photograph of an involuntarily isolated graduate student named Kalea Obermeyer, accompanied by a caption blandly informing the reader that the woman seated alone on a trunk in the confines of a cramped dormitory room, clumsily swathed in a surgical mask, “shelters in place” in “her most secure housing during the pandemic.”
Welcome to Pravda, COVID19 style.
Being an honest sort, I have considered whether I ought to write to the editors of my old university’s magazine, accusing them of playing toady to democracy-destroying propagandists.
Should I remind these so-called educators of the young that the term “shelter in place” is properly applied to air raids, not to “pandemics,” and is a cruel hoax when pressed into service to describe what is actually an illegal quarantine?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Tragedies of Our Time: Pandemic, Planning, and Racial Politics
TRAGEDIES OF OUR TIME: PANDEMIC, PLANNING, AND RACIAL POLITICS
An old adage says that tragedies often come in threes. Certainly, the first half of 2020 has seen a version of this. First, the coronavirus that has infected millions of people and killed hundreds of thousands. Second, the response by most governments to the virus by commanding near universal business lockdowns and stay-at-homes that have wrecked economic havoc on the world economy. And, third, the horrific killing of George Floyd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man in Minneapolis by a policeman, that has served as the catalyst for demonstrations against police abuse and charges of racism all around the world.
They are tragedies that, for the most part, have been man-made. Yes, the coronavirus has been a “force of nature,” though the verdict is still out on the actual origin of the virus and how it first entered the general population in Wuhan, China and then began to spread from one continent to another. But what has become fairly clear is the “human factor” in analyzing and forecasting its likely impact on the world population, which, in turn, highly influenced government responses to it.
Human “Error” in the Coronavirus Projections
British Professor Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), offered modeling projections about the likely spread and effect of the virus on the world population that greatly influenced the British and many other governments’ decisions to order business shutdowns and stay-at-home “social distancing” lockdowns. Partly because of this advice, much of the world’s social and economic life came to a halt.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Great Reset – The Final Battle Against Marxists
The Great Reset – The Final Battle Against Marxists
The rising civil unrest is starting to take notice of Bill Gates and his consortium hell-bent on changing the world economy. They have used the coronavirus as a ploy to shut down the world economy all for their Climate Change Agenda. There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence that points to Fauci funding the creation of this virus and transferring it to the Wuhan lab where neither China nor the United States leaked it, but this consortium which has planned this Event 201 on how to destroy the world economy and rebuild it from scratch. They are already introducing Guaranteed Basic Income, assuming they can wipe out over 300 million jobs and then pay people to sit home and watch TV, where they recreate the world in their own image which they are promoting as the Great Reset.
This has all been planned and it is being promoted by the infamous Davor — World Economic Forum. These people are all elitists who would never walk among us who they consider the great unwashed. They have unleashed domestic violence on the world and encouraged all the suicides by imprisoning people, and stripping them of all human rights. Their view is that the world is overpopulated, so thinning the herd to save the planet is justified and not genocide. Countries like Thailand saw their tourist trade collapse and countless food lines, all for a fake virus. These people have used the press to terrorize the people to achieve their goal to recreate the world economy as “greener, smarter, and fairer.” The World Economic Forum is promoting a Marxist agenda with a 50-page manifesto organized by the communist Thomas Piketty. The Forum promotes a new Marxist world, calling upon Piketty’s “urgent new message on how to fight inequality” where they want to attack anyone with wealth. Their proposal for Europe is to increase taxation by 400%!
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An Epically Bad Week for US Brick-and-Mortar Retailers and Landlords
An Epically Bad Week for US Brick-and-Mortar Retailers and Landlords
Winners in this crisis: Ecommerce – for retailers that don’t sell men’s office & formal wear – and for sure, lawyers.
Tailored Brands, a holding company for men’s apparel stores, including Men’s Wearhouse and JoS. A. Bank, is considering filing for bankruptcy, according to sources cited by Bloomberg on June 8. Bankruptcy would allow the company to shut weaker locations while keeping other stores operating, the sources said.
The company confirmed in an SEC filing on June 10 that it may have to file for bankruptcy:
“If the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are protracted and we are unable to increase liquidity and/or effectively address our debt position, we may be forced to scale back or terminate operations and/or seek protection under applicable bankruptcy laws. This could result in a complete loss of shareholder value,” it said.
But its problems started years ago, including the misbegotten $1.8 billion acquisition of JoS. A. Bank in 2014, whose revenues promptly went into a death spiral. Overall revenues fell every year since 2016.
In an update on June 10, Tailored Brands said that total revenues in the first quarter (ended May 2) collapsed by 60% year-over-year, with even ecommerce sales plunging 32%.
The company started re-opening its stores on May 7, and had 634 stores open by June 5. So how well are these reopened stores doing?
In the week ended June 5, for stores open at least the entire week, average comparable sales at Men’s Wearhouse were down 65%, at Jos. A. Bank 78%, and at K&G 40%.
That total ecommerce sales, including rental services, plunged 32% in the second quarter through June 5th – when retail has largely switched to ecommerce, and everyone else’s ecommerce sales are booming – is a sign that work-from-home has crushed demand for clothes worn to the office; and that the postponements of events such as weddings have crushed the demand for renting formal wear.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
If Stocks Don’t Hold Here We Could See Another Crash of Sorts
If Stocks Don’t Hold Here We Could See Another Crash of Sorts
Stocks have fallen hard over the weekend again. The media is pinning this drop on the potential for another COVID-19 pandemic, but the facts don’t support that theory.
At times like these, it’s essential to ignore narratives, and focus on price. With that in mind, the S&P 500 remains in an uptrend, barely (blue lines in the chart below). Stocks need to hold here for the bull market case to remain intact.
If stocks break down from here, there are two items in play. One is support at 2,940 (lower green line in the chart below). The other is the gap established by the open on May 18th (blue rectangle in the chart below).
When we plot the S&P 500 against the VIX (inverted), it looks like there’s more downside to go here.
However, both breadth and credit suggest the downside is limited here.
My point with all of this is that today the market is literally a crap shoot. The easy money from the rally has been made, and the next trend is not clear yet. So now is NOT the time to be putting a load of capital to work.
However, if stocks don’t hold here, we could potentially see a crash down to 2,700.
That is a high reward type move. And one we need to consider.
Canadian Banks Hit Hard By Low Oil Prices
Canadian Banks Hit Hard By Low Oil Prices
Canada’s government has been perhaps surprisingly ready to help the country’s ailing oil industry. Interest-only loans, backstopping loans that troubled companies can’t pay have been among the steps taken so far. But they may not be enough. Canada’s oil industry has arguably suffered more than its peers across its southern border or even most producers around the world. Already cheap because of pipeline troubles, Canadian oil slumped to new lows amid the oil price war and the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. While it has since improved in line with the international benchmarks, it hasn’t improved enough for the comfort of the local extractive industry. And it may drag banks down with it.
Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Canada’s largest banks reported an almost two-fold increase in impaired energy loans over their second quarter due to the oil price plunge and the pandemic. The increase amounted to more than US$1.47 billion (C$2 billion). What’s more, according to the report the country’s top six lenders had boosted their new lending to energy companies jumped by as much as 23 percent during that same quarter.
“Canadian banks’ energy exposure risks are increasing, with oil in a freefall and Canadian oil producers fighting to survive, as cash burn accelerates and liquidity dwindles,” a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst said in April when banks and companies were both bracing for this year’s renegotiation of borrowing bases amid the price plunge. According to Paul Gulberg, if just a tenth of the loans that Canadian banks had on their books at that time went bad, the lenders could lose a collective US$4.40 billion (C$6 billion).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Central Banks Bailed Out Markets To Avoid Trillions In Pension Losses
Central Banks Bailed Out Markets To Avoid Trillions In Pension Losses
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently published a report showing how pension funds in OECD countries recorded a massive loss of approximately $2.5 trillion during the stock market meltdown in February through late March. Shortly, after that, central banks intervened with monetary cannons to rescue stock markets and other financial assets to avoid pension returns from going negative.
The spread of COVID-19 worldwide and its knock-on effects on financial markets during the first quarter of 2020 are likely to have reversed some of these gains. Early estimates suggest that pension fund assets at the end of Q1 2020 could have dropped to USD 29.8 trillion, down 8% compared to end-2019 [or about a $2.5 trillion loss].
The drop in pension fund assets is forecast to stem from the decline in equity markets in the first quarter of 2020. Returns, inclusive of dividends and price appreciation, were negative on the MSCI World Index in the first quarter of 2020 (-20%), and between -11% and -24% on the MSCI Index for Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States.
An increase in the price of government bonds that pension funds own could partly offset some of the losses that pension funds experienced on equity markets in Q1 2020. Some Central Banks, such as the Federal Reserve in the United States, cut interest rates in 2020 to support the economy. The fall in interest rates may lead to an increase in the price of government bonds in the portfolios of pension funds as the yields of newly issued bonds decline. – OECD
Bloomberg’s Lisa Abramowicz pointed out in a tweet, “this report [referring to the OECD report] shows the massiveness of pension assets & points to why central banks are tethered to bailing out markets: social infrastructures depend on their not going down too much.”
Europe must prepare for life after oil
Europe must prepare for life after oil
The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to leave the fossil fuel era behind. Europe needs to begin preparing for what comes next.
Oil prices have crashed. The most visible cause has been the measures taken to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, which have triggered record lows in global oil demand.
Yet the crisis also exposes structural vulnerabilities in our fossil fuel-dependent economic system, which requires us to rapidly transition to an alternative energy system if we are to avert economic collapse.
The most important scientific concept to assess and understand these vulnerabilities is ‘Energy Return on Investment’ (EROI) – the foundation of the emerging discipline of biophysical economics. EROI is designed to measure how much energy is needed to extract energy from a particular resource. What’s left is known as surplus ‘net energy’, used to support goods and services in the economy outside the energy system. The higher the ratio, the more surplus energy is left for the economy. That surplus is running increasingly thin.
In the early 20th century, the EROI of fossil fuels was sometimes as high as 100:1: a single unit of energy would be enough to extract a hundred times that amount. But since then, the EROI of fossil fuels has gone down dramatically[1], as we are extracting fossil fuels from places that are increasingly difficult to reach. Between 1960 and 1980, the world average value EROI for fossil fuels declined[2] by more than half, from about 35:1 to 15:1. It’s still declining[3]: latest estimates put the value at between 6:1 and 3:1.
The decline of fossil fuels’ EROI has acted as a background ‘brake’ on the rate of economic growth for the world’s advanced industrial economies, which has been slowing down[4] since the 1970s.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
COVID Spreads To 60 Plants, Sparks Fear Of US Food Shortages As 2nd Wave Strikes
COVID Spreads To 60 Plants, Sparks Fear Of US Food Shortages As 2nd Wave Strikes
A new report reveals the severity of COVID-19 spreading beyond meatpacking plants to food processing facilities across the US.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) outlines this new reality of how the fast-spreading virus has infected 1,200 food processing workers at 60 plants from mid-March to early June.
To compile these statics, EWG reviewed news articles of outbreaks and noticed many of the infections were seen at Kraft Heinz, Birds Eye, Conagra, and the Campbell Soup Company’s Pepperidge Farm, as well as those of smaller plants, like Fairmont Foods and Ruiz Foods.
Food Processing Plants With the Most Reported COVID-19 Cases
Bloomberg elaborated on EWG’s findings and said: “These are the first national numbers of their kind. The advocacy group compiled its figures using local media reports because there are no federal agencies reporting the data. The true total is almost certainly higher.”
Bakers, dairy workers, fruit and vegetable packers, many of whom are deemed “essential” have worked through the pandemic, sometimes laboring in tight quarters.
“At our workplace, we were not ready for this virus. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t know about it,” Paula Zambrano,61, who packs fruit at Borton & Sons in Yakima, Washington. She was so concerned back in April of an outbreak at her plant that she stayed home for three weeks. Low on money, she returned to work to support her family.
“People are infected, and they come to work. They keep quiet about it,” Zambrano said. “We live from our work. We are surviving from our wages. If we have children, how will we feed them?”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Insanity? Markets continue disconnect from economy and society
Insanity? Markets continue disconnect from economy and society
It’s hard to ignore the protests on the streets of the world’s cities of late. Those protests are coming from a populace who knows that the system they live under long ago stopped benefiting them. While the focus has been the senseless killing by police of an African-American man—all of which was caught on video—there are many other grievances: legalized financial theft by the one percent from the rest of us comes to mind, something that has resulted in growing and egregious inequality across the world.
It’s also hard to overestimate the hardship visited on the world’s people as many have been deprived of income and daily life by up to three months of pandemic-inspired stay-at-home orders and retail shutdowns. As I mentioned in my previous piece, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta does a frequently updated estimate of U.S. GDP which as of this writing is minus 53.8 percent for the second quarter. (That’s annualized and seasonally adjusted.) The estimate for the current quarter started at minus 12.1 percent and has been dropping like a stone with each new piece of information. For comparison, U.S. GDP during the 2008-2009 financial crises shrank by only 4.2 percent.
And yet, the world’s stock markets are behaving as if the protests and the deprivation are inconsequential. After crashing in March in the wake of the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, major stock market indices are at or near all-time highs. For example, the S&P 500 Index was last around its Friday closing price on February 24, before the coronavirus pandemic market panic. How can this be explained?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
