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By now, we know that Bill Hwang was a mentor to Cathie Wood and that both investors had a penchant for bringing religion into their investing methodology, as we noted in a report we published days ago.

But a new Bloomberg piece shines even more light as to how close Wood and Hwang were in the investing world. A new report that details how Hwang lost $20 billion in 2 days also highlights how he was “on the same trajectory” as Wood. 

For example, in 2016, Hwang was invited to a weekend retreat put on by Princeton Theological Seminary that was set up to “connect Christians in finance”. The Saturday keynote dinner that weekend featured Wood, who was then a startup manager and and an adviser to the ministry.

After then, Hwang became an investor in Wood’s firms, and “Archegos and ARK collaborated on industry research,” the report notes. Hwang is “a backer” of Wood’s, as we pointed out last week. Wood, like Hwang, holds Bible study meetings in her office. 

While pitching a Google thesis in 2019, Hwang said: “God also cares about fair price, because the scripture said God hates wrong scales. My company does a little bit, our part, bringing a fair price to Google stock. Is it important to God? Absolutely.”

At one point, Hwang “appeared to be channeling the same thesis as Wood” with his stock selections, the report says. And now, they don’t mean gamma squeezes – they said Hwang was targeting “technological disruption.”

And while we ultimately know the fate of Hwang’s firm, Cathie Wood is still flying high. In fact, it was reported this week that Goldman Sachs is taking a page out of her playbook by planning to create the Future Consumer Equity ETF, which seeks to focus on technology, lifestyle and values of the younger generation. 

It’s Goldman’s first actively managed equity ETF, the type of security Wood found success with in her flagship ARKK ETF.

Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF research for CFRA Research, said: “Given the success of Ark in the past year, many asset managers are seeking to tap into growing investor demand for actively managed equity ETFs using in-house expertise.”

80% of global ETF investors are looking to increase their exposure to thematic products this year, the report notes. For Wood, whose recent strategy appears to be having her ETFs buy up her own ETFs and heavily concentrating herself in relatively illiquid names, she better hope that the survey is right.

Otherwise it truly could be a “Jesus take the wheel” type moment – as Bill Hwang recently experienced. 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Going to the grocery store in Massachusetts in 2020 guaranteed you would breathe heaps of sanitizer. A full-time employee scrubbed down shopping carts between customers. Conveyor belts at the checkout counter were blasted and wiped between every sale. Glass surfaces were sprayed as often as possible. The plastic keypads on credit machines were not only covered in plastic – why putting plastic on plastic stopped Covid was never clear – but also sprayed between uses. 

Employees would carefully watch your hands to see what you touched, and as you exited the space would cover the area with cleaning spray. 

It was the same at offices and schools. If a single person turned in a positive PCR test, the entire place had to be evacuated for a 48-hour fumigation. Everything had to be wiped, sprayed, and scrubbed, to get rid of the Covid that surely must be present in the bad place. The ritualistic cleaning took on a religious element, as if the temple must be purified of the devil before God could or would come back. 

All of this stemmed from the belief that the germ lived on surfaces and in spaces, which in turn stemmed from a primitive intuition. You can’t see the virus so it really could be anywhere. The human imagination took over the rest. 

I was in Hudson, New York, at a fancy breakfast house that had imposed random Covid protocols. It was cold outside but they wouldn’t let me sit inside, even though there were no government restrictions on doing so. I asked that masked-up twenty-something why. She said “Covid.”  

“Do you really believe that there’s Covid inside that room?”

“Yes.”

Subway cars were cleaned daily. Facebook routinely shut its offices for a full scrub. Mail was left to disinfect for days before being opened. Things went crazy: playgrounds removed nets from basketball hoops for fear that they carried Covid. 

During the whole pathetic episode of last year, people turned wildly against physical things. No sharing of pencils at the schools that would open. No salt and pepper shakers at tables because surely that’s where Covid lives. No more physical menus. They were replaced by QR codes. Your phone probably has Covid too but at least only you touched it. 

“Touchless”’ became the new goal. All physical things became the untouchables, again reminiscent of ancient religions that considered the physical world to be a force of darkness while the spiritual/digital world points to the light. The followers of the Prophet Mani would be pleased. 

Already back in February, AIER reported that something was very wrong about all of this. Studies were already appearing calling the physical-phobic frenzy baseless. 

The demonization of surfaces and rooms stemmed not just from active imaginations; it was also recommended and even mandated by the CDC. It offered a huge page of instructions on the need constantly to fear, scrub, and fumigate. 

On April 5, however, the CDC page was replaced by a much-simplified set of instructions, which includes now this discreet note: “In most situations, the risk of infection from touching a surface is low.” Oh is that so? 

The link goes to the following:

Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) studies have been conducted to understand and characterize the relative risk of SARS-CoV-2 fomite transmission and evaluate the need for and effectiveness of prevention measures to reduce risk. Findings of these studies suggest that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.

Whoops. 

So much for the many billions spent on cleaning products, the employees and the time, and hysteria and frenzy, the rise of touchlessness, and gloves, the dousing of the whole world. The science apparently changed. Still it will be years before people get the news and act on it. Once the myths of surface transmission of a respiratory virus are unleashed, it will be hard to go back to normal. 

Fortunately the New York Times did some accurate reporting on the CDC update, quoting all kinds of experts who claim to have known this all along. 

“Finally,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. “We’ve known this for a long time and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning.” She added, “There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface.”

Still, I’m willing to bet that if right now I headed to a WalMart or some other large chain store, there will be several employees dedicated to disinfecting everything they can, and there will be customers there who demand it to be so. 

How many years will it take before people can come to terms with the embarrassing and scandalous reality that much of what posed as Science last year was made up on the fly and turns out to be wholly false? 

Initially centered in the auto industry, the semiconductor shortage has now spread to a range of other consumer electronics, including computers, smartphones, tablets, headphones, and appliances. The latest news is that internet routers could become the next victim of chip shortages disrupting global supply chains and may pose a problem for households and businesses who need an internet connection to survive in today’s digital economy. 

Sources told Bloomberg that internet service providers report delays of up to one year for network routers due to chip shortages. This is doubled previous wait times, the source added.

In today’s hybrid work environment, internet routers are among the most critical devices to keep businesses and employees connected. If a router shortage develops, it will prevent an internet service provider from adding new customers to its network. Nevertheless, existing customers wouldn’t have their routers serviced upon malfunction or upgraded if they need more speed. 

Karsten Gewecke, head of European regional business for Zyxel Communications Corp, a Taiwan-based router-producer, said remote work spurred by the virus pandemic led to a massive demand pull for home broadband equipment. The chip shortages couldn’t have come at the worst time as more people work from home. 

Zyxel recently urged customers to order routers well in advance because the lead time for semiconductor components from Broadcom has doubled since last year. Zyxel is a major supplier of routers across Europe.

Adtran, a U.S. network equipment maker, warned customers about upcoming supply chain risks and has more than double its inventory to avoid chip shortages. 

Gewecke said no internet service provider had exhausted their inventory of routers, but supplies will be tight for the next six months. “We have been very close several times,” he said. “It could still happen.”

Susquehanna Financial Group shows lead times for chip orders has just surpassed the 2018 highs. 

“It’s a snowball effect that we’re pushing in front of us, and the situation since then has just become worse and worse and worse,” said Gewecke. “When I talk to some of the chipset vendors, some of them tell me that they have something like overbooking of 300% of their capacity.”

It comes as no surprise that given the current shortage in semiconductors, chip prices are quickly rising in early 2021. 

Earlier in the year,  we noted that the chip situation had been turning dire and was now being referred to as the “most serious shortage in years”. Qualcomm’s CEO said last month that there were now shortages “across the board.” 

And it wasn’t just Qualcomm or Samsung executives speaking out: industry sources said chip shortages are now beginning to hit Apple. 

The potential shortage of network routers comes at the worst possible timing as the workforce’s digitalization pushes millions of people into remote or hybrid work that means network routers, if it’s at home or their employer, are more critical than ever. 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

French authorities have told Airbnb property owners to report customers to the police who they believe to have violated lockdown rules.

The request was made after cops noted an increase in Parisians attempting to evade the city’s new lockdown by renting out larger Airbnb properties for rule-breaking gatherings.

According to Marlène Schiappa, the Ministry of Interior’s Minister Delegate in charge of citizenship, there have been “354 festive gatherings in private spaces and sometimes places that have been rented” since mid-December.

“There were sometimes parties in homes that the police thought were rented through the Airbnb platform, so it’s very important for us to work with all the platforms,” said Schiappa.

Authorities are also working directly with Airbnb, Booking.com and Gîtes de France and have requested that they demand more information from customers, such as a reason as to why they’re renting large apartments.

As we previously highlighted, while the social activities of normal Parisians are being ruthlessly patrolled by the authorities, for the wealthy and politically well connected it’s a different story.

French TV channel M6 aired secretly recorded footage exposing how elitists, some of them government ministers, had been flagrantly violating lockdown rules by having secret dinners at luxury restaurants, with the meals costing as much as €490 euros per person.

As ever, it’s one rule for them and another for everybody else.

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After canceling Germany’s draconian Easter lockdown last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel “took full responsibility” for her misjudgment. But,now it looks like her government is reverting to the decision that new COVID-19 restrictions need to be put in place, before spiking COVID cases lead to a surfeit of deaths.

A new proposed plan has been developed to implement nighttime curfews, sweeping business closures and severe limits on public gatherings. These measures, and more, are all part of the German government’s new bill aimed at “standardizing” COVID-19 measures to stop the third wave.

RT reports that Berlin is currently working on amendments to the national Infection Protection Act, which would reimpose lockdown restrictions and greatly reduce the federal states’ ability to defy the government’s orders, German media that obtained the draft document report.

The document that is expected to be discussed and potentially approved by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet on Tuesday will require all federal states where an average seven-day COVID-19 infection rate will rise over 100 per 100K people.

Such states will no longer be able to find any excuses to avoid imposing the so-called “emergency brake.”

All states over this threshold infection rate will be bound to introduce a standard set of measures developed by the federal government, should the legislation come into force. Such measures involve a night-time curfew between 2100ET and 0500ET, with exceptions made for medical emergencies, professional activities and for people engaged in caregiving, whether for other people or animals.

If adopted, the new measures would impact all German federal states. According to the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s federal agency responsible for disease control and prevention), only three out of 16 federal states have a seven-day incidence rate below 100 per 100K people. In the western state of Saarland, this rate is 98.8, which means it could potentially cross the threshold at any moment. German authorities are seemingly aiming to implement the new rules as soon as possible.

According to some media reports, Merkel’s federal cabinet and the states’ governments had all assented to the bill.

The German Bundestag President Wolfgang Schauble also made it clear that the parliament could potentially approve the new bill as early as next week. The legislation would then need to pass through the Bundestag,another house of the German parliament representing the federal states, and can come into force as early as April 19, according to some media reports.