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2021 ends with a question: Are NFTs here to stay?

NFTs are the biggest disrupter in art this year, with artists minting, exhibiting and auctioning, and investors buying, selling and trading.
In her monthly Expert Take column, Selva Ozelli, an international tax attorney and CPA, covers

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NFTs are the biggest disrupter in art this year, with artists minting, exhibiting and auctioning, and investors buying, selling and trading.

In her monthly Expert Take column, Selva Ozelli, an international tax attorney and CPA, covers the intersection between emerging technologies and sustainability, and provides the latest developments around taxes, AML/CFT regulations and legal issues affecting crypto and blockchain.

On Nov. 14, Tezos-based nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace Hic Et Nunc — which in Latin means “here and now” — abruptly shut down. Artists became worried about their NFTs on exhibit at the Hermitage Museum’s first-ever NFT exhibition, “Ethereal Aether” (Nov. 10 to Dec. 10), as well as Art Basel Miami’s first-ever NFT exhibition, “Humans + Machines: NFTs and the Ever-Evolving World of Art” (Dec. 2 to 4).

Diane Drubay, founder of We Are Museums and a minter of NFTs on Hic Et Nunc — who curated a panel discussion at Art Basel Miami — explained to me: “Of course, it was a shock to see Hic et Nunc shut down, but people took it right away as a new step over in their journey. Because when the website shut down, our NFTs were preserved on-chain, nothing was lost and artists were safe to keep making a living from their NFTs. We saw mirrors or new versions of HicEtNunc.art being opened only a few hours later, which provided the necessary backup for artists to keep selling and buying, exhibiting NFTs.” She also added:

“The community is now organizing itself to create a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to keep experimenting with decentralization on Web 3.0.”

This incident made me wonder: Will the “International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development,” as declared by the United Nations General Assembly, go down in history as the year NFTs entered the mainstream? Or will it go down as a passing global fad of invention lurking in the shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic? I conducted research and interviews to find the answer.

Related: What are NFTs, and why are they revolutionizing the art world?

NFTs’ environmental impact, valuation and regulation

NFTs are digital assets that are built on a blockchain platform and are tradeable like digital trading cards in exchange for cryptocurrencies or even fiat currency. They generally act as evidence of ownership of digital assets, but the specific rights that attach to NFTs vary. Some NFTs incorporate “smart contracts” as part of the token that self-execute when defined events occur.

Computer scientist “Antsstyle” has critiqued NFTs:

“In a nutshell, NFTs are bad for two reasons: 1. They are bad for the environment, as they rely on cryptocurrencies that cause huge amounts of carbon emissions. [...] 2. They are only valuable as tools for money laundering, tax evasion, and greater fool investment fraud.”

The long version of Antsstyle’s analysis gives a comprehensive overview of proof-of-stake (energy-efficient) and proof-of-work (energy-intensive) NFT platforms.

A. J. Woloszynski, manager at Eisner Advisory Group LLC of EisnerAmper, pointed out, furthermore, that NFTs have subjective valuations determined by however much somebody is willing to pay for them: “For example, take a look at the image below. You are not encountering an issue with the image loading on your computer; what you are seeing is a plain gray box. This is an NFT known as The Pixel, produced by an artist who goes by the name [Pak] and sold for roughly $1.3 million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction in April 2021.” Other major art auction houses such as Christie’s, Phillips and Portion also began auctioning NFTs minted on various nonfungible token platforms this year.

Related: Art reimagined: NFTs are changing the collectibles market

According to CryptoArt, Pak is the second-highest-selling crypto artist of all time, with around a $65 million market capitalization for his art pieces. NonFungible ranks Bored Ape Yacht Club at number one, with the “Bored Ape #9449” NFT last selling for above $1 million.

While not ranked by NonFungible, the low-pixel 24x24 images of computer-generated CryptoPunks by Larva Labs were the first major NFTs. In March, CryptoPunk #3100 sold for 4,200 Ether (ETH), or $7.6 million at the time. This sale was surpassed by the sale of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” an NFT by graphic designer Mike Winkelmann, aka “Beeple,” that raised $69.3 million that same day, amounting to $13,800 per each work of digital art included in the collage. According to DappRadar, CryptoKitties by Dapper Labs — the first big Ethereum-based NFT project to use the ERC-721 standard — also registered a 22,106% day-over-day increase in trading volume amid the recent NFT market resurgence.

NFTs are not widely regulated. For example, earlier this year at leading NFT marketplace OpenSea, an executive was flipping nonfungible tokens he purchased after featuring them on the site’s homepage — a move that presumably allowed him to sell them for a quick profit, since insider trading of NFTs on markets is not explicitly illegal. In another instance, 265 ETH ($1.1 million) worth of fraudulent NFTs claiming to be issued by Hong Kong-based gaming and venture capital company Animoca Brands and subsidiary Blowfish Studios were minted and sold via Discord. In the NFT heist of the century, a hacker uploaded 20 terabytes of NFTs originally minted on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.

Related: Nonfungible tokens from a legal perspective

Blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis estimated that about 0.34% of transaction volume in the $2.5-trillion cryptocurrency market, or about $8.5 billion worth, relates to illicit activity. According to NonFungible, 265,927 active wallets traded NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain during Q3. To investigate cross-border tax crimes with the rapid rise of cryptocurrency and NFTs and their use in money laundering, hacking, cyberattacks and other illicit transactions, governments around the world — especially the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement — have been sharing information and resources.

Related: Cybercrime task force monitoring the global digital financial system

Earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service rolled out “Operation Hidden Treasure” in collaboration with personnel from its civil office of fraud enforcement and its criminal investigation unit to examine tax evasion among users of cryptocurrency and NFTs. The latest report by IRS Criminal Investigation states that 93% of all seizures during fiscal year 2021, valued at $3.5 billion, involved cryptocurrencies. The United States Treasury Department also put 57 cryptocurrency addresses on its sanction list, along with one exchange — Latvia-based Chatex, which the Treasury Department said facilitated transactions related to “illicit or high-risk activities such as darknet markets, high-risk exchanges, and ransomware.”

Continuing U.S. President Joe Biden’s whole-of-government effort to counter ransomware and the illicit use of cryptocurrency and NFTs, more tax regulations have been implemented. H.R. 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, requires cryptocurrency “brokers” — which includes “any person who for consideration is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person” — to report cryptocurrency and NFT purchases of over $10,000 to the IRS on Form 8300, including names and Social Security numbers, or potentially face felony charges.

In October, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) issued new guidance concerning NFTs, stating that they are excluded in its definition of virtual assets. But FATF standards could still apply to NFTs on a case-by-case basis.

Sustainable NFTs

This year, NFTs have been the biggest disruptors of the art world, with artists minting, exhibiting and auctioning, and investors buying, selling, trading and investing. Nash Islam, an early investor in NFTs, said: “For NFTs, the community action is primarily on Twitter & Discord.” He also added:

“Investing in Pak across multiple projects has yielded massive multiples and also helped us understand and establish some principles for NFT investments.”

Even Damien Hirst, the United Kingdom’s richest living artist, launched an NFT series titled “The Currency” this year, exploring the nature of value, art and currency. It was minted on Palm, an NFT platform operating as an Ethereum sidechain, and offered for sale through Heni at $2,000 apiece.

Artist Ilya Shkipin told me he decided to mint his MonarxNFT series on the energy-efficient, open-source Tezos NFT platform: “Choosing Tezos wasn’t a choice but an obvious decision once we spoke with our supporters. Both the Monarx team and the community valued low gas fees and a convenient minting experience. We ended up doing what our community told us to do because the art is for them, not us. My MonarxNFT series — merge of a neural network carefully guided by artistic vision — was inspired at a time of loss in my life.”

Reid Yager, global director of communications and public relations for Tezos, explained to me that Tezos is presenting the first-ever NFT art exhibition occurring as an official partner of international art fair Art Basel, in collaboration with the host city’s local institutions: “The Tezos Ecosystem Exhibition at Art Basel Miami Beach will feature more than 25 artists from 18 countries spanning 5 continents showcasing their work. Additionally, over 30 artists, gallerists, museum directors, celebrities, and thought leaders will participate in the Tezos Ecosystem Exhibition Speaker Series in the exhibit space.” As part of the show, visitors will be able to create AI-generated portraits of themselves and mint them as NFTs on Tezos.

Yager added: “The leading Tezos NFT platform HicEtNunc, which recently completed the first-ever NFT marketplace Web3 transition from platform-owned to community-owned (DAO), has seen over half a million NFTs minted by users from every corner of the globe. The Tezos blockchain is booming with over 6 million contract calls in September, and November is on pace to top that. The Tezos blockchain is the choice for minting and collecting NFTs globally. In fact, one of the first ever NFTs from a Museum was minted on the Tezos blockchain by the Whitworth Museum — William Blake’s The Ancient of Days.”

According to DappRadar, Hic Et Nunc was the 14th-largest nonfungible token marketplace in terms of all-time sales ($50.37 million) when it shut down, with the average sale at $25.19 per NFT. The leading marketplace for NFT trading is New York-based OpenSea, which operates on the proof-of-work Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is in the process of transitioning to Ethereum 2.0, a proof-of-stake blockchain, which will be 99% less energy-intensive and more scalable, secure and sustainable. But whether OpenSea or any of the other top-ranked marketplaces will be able to hold their place in this fast-changing market is yet to be seen, as some of the largest companies have been entering the NFT space to transform the Metaverse, including:

  • Technology companies: TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaohongshu, NetEase, Baidu, Microsoft and eBay.
  • Fintech companies: China’s Blockchain-based Service Network, which will support future central bank digital currencies from various countries, launched infrastructure to support the deployment of NFTs in China and other countries.
  • Cryptocurrency marketplaces: Coinbase and Binance NFT, which sold the Hermitage Museum’s first nonfungible token.

NFTs and museums

A study carried out by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) found that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 30% of museums were forced to reduce their staff and nearly 6% may never be able to reopen to the public. But the digitization of museums is taking place at high speed, with some museums turning to NFTs for a variety of reasons.

Related: Charitable sustainable NFTs for the United Nations’ 17 SDGs

NFT exhibitions

The Hermitage Museum’s “Ethereal Aether” consisted of 36 NFTs from around the world, including Larva Labs’ “ryptopunk #5652,” “Schrödinger’s Cat” from Dapper Labs’ CryptoKitties and Mihai Grecu’s “NeoPyongyang I,” minted on Hic Et Nunc.

The curators, Dimitri Ozekov and Anastasia Garnova, explained to me: “Interest in digital art intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people sat at home for months on end with the museums closed. The first NFT exhibition will launch the creation of the ‘Celestial Hermitage’ — a new museum in the virtual noosphere, which in the future will be transformed into a digital branch of the actual museum.” They also added:

“We are confident that the area of digital art, NFTs in particular, will develop in incredible ways, and that it can look forward to a great future — safe, smart and fascinating.”

Guggenheim Partners co-founder Todd Morley announced plans to create the world’s biggest museum dedicated to NFTs, within a massive skyscraper located in New York City, just four blocks from the Museum of Modern Art.

NFT fundraising by museums

Three out of the 20 largest museums in the world — the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (No. 2), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (No. 4) and the British Museum in London (No. 12) — turned to NFTs for fundraising this year. Other examples include the Uffizi in Florence, the Whitworth in Manchester, the Museum and Church of São Roque in Lisbon, the Kansong Art Museum in Seoul, the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. There’s even an NFT of an entire museum based in the Metaverse called the Museum of Digital Life.

The Miami Institute of Contemporary Art accepted a donation of “CryptoPunk #5293” from one of its trustees.

Jean-Sébastien Beaucamps, co-founder of French eco-friendly startup LaCollection — an Ethereum-based NFT platform — explained to me: “To coincide with its Hokusai: The Great Picture of Everything exhibition (30 September to 30 January 2022), the British Museum partnered with LaCollection.io, to sell NFTs of 200 Hokusai works. For each NFT minted by our company, we will plant a tree to compensate for the wildfires of last summer and for our NFTs to be carbon neutral: we call it our NFTree program. The NFTs will consist of works in the exhibition, including the famed The Great Wave, while another 100 will be from the BM’s own collection, including drawings from the recently re-discovered book which is the subject of the exhibition.”

NFTs and environmental education

This year, during its 48th annual conference — where I held an art show titled “Museums & Environmental Concerns, New Insights” — the ICOM’s International Committee for Museums and Collections of Science and Technology addressed our planet’s environmental concerns and the way science and technology museums can approach and present this important issue via education and exhibitions. I interviewed several museum directors to learn about the role of NFTs in their museums. Here is what they told me.

George Ma, head of the climate action section, social responsibility and the sustainable development office at the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change at The Chinese University of Hong Kong:

“NFTs are currently not on our radar, but something we could keep an eye on. We digitized our exhibitions. We have a 360 Virtual Tour which is the digital version of our permanent exhibition. Since 2018, for every themed exhibition we developed, we also produced a digital version of it, either in a more website-like format or in 360 VR.”

Patrick Hamilton, director of climate change, energy and the environment at the Science Museum of Minnesota:

“The Science Museum of Minnesota is digitizing its collections but I’m not aware of any current plans to digitize its exhibits or sell NFTs.”

Julie Decker, director and CEO of the Anchorage Museum:

“NFTs are a really interesting topic to think and read about. Currently, we do not have plans.”

Viviane Gosselin, director of collections and exhibitions and curator of contemporary culture at the Museum of Vancouver:

“At the moment we are not selling NFTs for fundraising or collecting purposes — not yet. My understanding is that it is not by and large a ‘green industry’ so that is a bit of a red flag and turn off for me!”

Soren Brothers, Shiff curator of climate change at the Royal Ontario Museum:

“ROM is digitizing its collections, which can be accessed here (https://collections.rom.on.ca/). I don’t know anything about whether ROM has plans to sell NFTs.”

It should be noted that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has an Art + Technology Lab where it runs a series to explore what NFTs mean for institutions collecting digital art. It also examines the “artistic, curatorial, conservation, registration, and legal issues of this new digital format.” We Are Museums’ Drubay also recently announced “Unlocking Web3 for the Arts and Culture,” a new program organized by We Are Museums in collaboration with TZ Connect and the Blockchain Art Directory 2.0 to guide arts and culture professionals to navigate Web3 innovations.

Conclusion

I remember reading in the early 1990s that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said art would digitize and people would not hang artwork on their walls anymore, instead projecting any masterpiece onto a digital screen on their walls. At the time, this novel idea had me very excited.

Fast-forward to 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and NFT sale volumes surged 1,000%, with people interested in using them in a multitude of areas: visual arts, videos, music, collectibles, to raise brand awareness, gaming, publishing, carbon trading and fundraising.

Did you know that a rug given as a gift to Pope Francis by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, was minted as an NFT and put up for sale to raise funds for Afghan rug weavers, who will receive 80% of the sale’s proceeds?

I think NFTs — named word of the year by Collins Dictionary — are here to stay.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Selva Ozelli, Esq., CPA, is an international tax attorney and certified public accountant who frequently writes about tax, legal and accounting issues for Tax Notes, Bloomberg BNA, other publications and the OECD.

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now…

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March 9, 2024

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.

The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.

Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.

In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.

The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.

When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.

If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.

We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.

My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.

It goes like this:

1) lockdown,

2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,

3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,

5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,

6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,

7) businesses flee the city

8) cities fall into decay, and that results in

9) more surveillance and police state.

The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.

It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.

But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.

It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.

Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.

As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.

The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.

Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.

By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.

The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.

Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.

The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.

The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.

But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.

What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.

As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.

The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.

Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 16:20

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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March 9, 2024

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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March 9, 2024

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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