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Message to Investors: The V recovery Borg have the upper hand. Assimilate or hide!

PBOC’s Powerful Policies to Boost Asia

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FacebookTwitterEmail The PBOC signalled on Sunday, its intention to engage in more powerful policies to counter the slide in Chinese growth from the COVID-19 pandemic. In a rather Fed-like twin-mandate way, the PBOC stated in its quarterly monetary report that it would concentrate on growth and jobs amongst other things. In a decidedly non-Fed way, it indicated that it would maintain “normal” monetary policy, implying that quantitative easing and its ilk are not in the PBOC’s playbook. That, of course, does not mean that interest rates could not be much lower than where they are today though, and the report does imply that more cuts in the Loan Prime Rate are on the way. That should be enough to ensure that the welcome to your illusion rally in asset markets continues at full steam ahead in Asia today. That is despite a sudden outbreak of COVID-19 again in South Korea this weekend. Infected partygoers unwittingly exposure potentially thousands of their fellow night clubbers to some very non-uplifting house. Authorities in Seoul shut down bars and clubs in the capital and told the potentially 6000-7000 clubbers potentially exposed, that the only house they will be experiencing, is the four walls of Mum and Dad’s as they self-isolate. China has partially locked down the city of Jilin near the North Korean border after a surge in coronavirus cases. Singapore and Russian cases continued to climb over the weekend. And even the US White House has not been spared, as Mike Pence’s press secretary and various other staff all tested positive for coronavirus. All of which serves to highlight life after lockdowns for the world, and what an insidious nasty COVID-19 will be to control, let alone eliminate. With lockdowns being eased across Europe and Australasia, as well as the USA, and the rate of people dying falling in many countries, markets will likely ignore the threat of COVID-19 part two, staying with the momentum of the peak-virus trade. That all ran utterly to plan on Friday night, as expected by the author, unfortunately. The US Non-Farm Payrolls printed a drop of 20.5 million jobs. As stated on Friday, that news was well baked into the markets, and equities and energy rallied strongly, as did the rotation out of haven positions. With COVID-19 is defeated, or even controlled, you could argue. Millions of jobs are lost, whole industries are facing annihilation and the global economy taking repeated 8-counts. Wiser minds than I are also pondering how Wall Street could be so disconnected from the high street. The answer lies in the in momentum, hope, and central banks prepared to use unlimited amounts of unconventional monetary policy to backstop anybody suffering a loss. Financial markets are incredibly efficient at short term groupthink, seizing the narrative that suits their hopes in a lemming-like fashion, ignoring the bits that don’t. All in an emperor’s new clothes fashion; justified under the guise of being “forward-looking.” The momentum of the FOMO peak-virus v-shaped recovery Borg collective have the upper hand now, and resistance is futile. Until it isn’t. When that time comes, the reversal could be emotional, indeed. In the meantime, investors should either partially assimilate, or hide and await Star Fleet’s arrival. Another wise man, undoubtedly cleverer than I, John Maynard Keynes, once said: “markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” You can build an entire career in investing around that phrase, and never has his sage advice been more relevant—one to beam up Scotty. Asia is bereft of tier-1 data today, with local markets, therefore, at the mercy of short-term headline volatility to detract from the peak-virus juggernaut. Data highlights for the region include Australian Unemployment on Thursday and China’s Industrial Production and Retail Sales on Friday. With the PBOC signalling, a release of the doves, poor numbers on Friday will be met with an expectation of further China stimulus on the way. In this market, that probably means continuing buying equities. US inflation on Tuesday night is expected to fall from 1.50% to 0.40%. That will probably impact bond markets more than other asset classes, with US yields likely to edge lower again, possibly eroding support for the US Dollar. PBOC easing bias to support Asian equities. The PBOC’s intention to more proactively support the Chinese economy is likely to boost equities across Asia today. Wall Street shrugged off a fall in Non-Farm Payrolls of 20.5 million jobs, and an explosion of the Unemployment rate to 14.70%. Both data points were lower than the street’s forecast with stocks not pausing for breath, finishing the session strongly. The S&P 500 rose 1.1%, the NASDAQ rose 1.0%, and the Dow Jones gained 1.3%. The US Dollar continues to wilt in the face of the peak-virus trade. The US Dollar mostly edged lower against most major and developing market currencies overnight as bullish momentum in equities and a rotation into EM continued unabated. Notably, the Dollar rose against fellow haven currency, the Japanese Yen, increasing 0.35% to 106.65. Higher oil prices saw the greenback give ground against the CAD, RUB and NOK, with the Mexican Peso notably outperforming, USD/MXN falling 1.50% to 23.6740. The trade-sensitive Australian Dollar again performed well on Friday, rising 0.55% to 0.6535, just below its 100-day moving average at 0.6540. The AUD/USD is likely to test higher again today in Asia following the dovish PBOC quarterly report released yesterday. Regional currencies should continue to fare better against the greenback with KRW, IDR and SGD expected to be the primary beneficiaries. Politics may temper gains by the Malaysian Ringgit this week. The Parliamentary Speaker is granting permission for a no-confidence vote to proceed when Parliament reconvenes on May 18th. Oil enjoys a bumper day as Baker Hughes rig counts fall. Oil had another outstanding day with the post-virus economic recovery momentum unabated. That was boosted further by the Baker Hughes Rig Count data, which showed the Oil Rigs count hitting a new low of 292 rigs. As recently as March, that count was 683 oil rigs, showing the scale of the new well cutbacks by the US oil industry. The expectations of lower US production, and higher consumption, as lockdowns globally are reduced, was fuel on the fire for oil prices on Friday. Brent crude leapt 5.05% to $30.85 a barrel, also its 50-day moving average. Brent’s next resistance is at $32.00 a barrel, with a break opening further rallies to $36.00 a barrel. WTI broke its 50-day moving average at $25.40 a barrel on the way to a 5.15% rise to $26.10 a barrel. WTI has resistance at $28.00 and $29.00 a barrel. The PBOC quarterly report should ensure that any profit-taking seen in early Asia is limited. The prospect of more Chinese stimulus should be positive for oil prices as the Asian session progresses. Gold continues to make much ado about nothing. The rotation out of haven positioning on Friday saw gold fall by 0.77% to $1702.50 an ounce, wiping out much of the previous day’s gains. Yet again though, it must be emphasised that gold continues to trade off the whims of day to day sentiment. A clear direction has yet to be established in May. Gold remains anchored in the middle of its larger $1650.00 to $1750.00 an ounce range. Until one of those sides breaks comprehensively, gold will continue to occupy the cheap seats of the financial market’s theatre.

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super…

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.

(Left) President Joe Biden delivers remarks on canceling student debt at Culver City Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 21, 2024. (Right) Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 27, 2024. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images)

With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.

The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.

Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).

Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.

When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.

High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.

There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.

Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.

The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.

More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.

St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.

Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.

In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.

2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.

Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.

Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 23:20

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The…

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

Doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Washington in a file image. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 22:10

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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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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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