Category: zerohedge

Ukrainian authorities are investigating the shocking and mysterious death of a US Embassy employee on Wednesday. 

So far all that is known is that a woman was found lying unconscious near railroad tracks in a park near the city center, apparently the victim of a brutal attack, given she had a head injury, according to Reuters.

She succumbed to her wounds at a nearby hospital, after which investigators found her ID, indicating she was employed by the US embassy in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The US Embassy-Kyiv subsequently confirmed an American member of its staff has died under unknown circumstances.

A criminal investigation is underway, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko, who issued a statement in English saying it “may be a crime”. He followed with: “But may be an accident too. Body was found on railway in earphones during the jogging.”

“The unconscious woman was admitted to a hospital where she subsequently died. During the examination of the victim’s belongings, an identity card of an employee of the U.S. Embassy in her name was found,” Ukrainian police said.

Police say the investigation is focused on suspected murder and that they are seeking a suspect based on possible eyewitness accounts, described as follows:

Police are looking for a dark-haired man of 30-40, dressed in dark shorts and a T-shirt. 

Within hours after the news breaking, the US Embassy-Kyiv issued confirmation.

Little is known as to the identify of the woman, other than she was an American citizen. American embassies abroad also typically employ dozens of local workers within the host country, but the confirmation suggests she could be US diplomatic personnel, or part of another high level agency.

“We are heartbroken to report the death of an American member of the U.S. Embassy Kyiv community,” an official US Embassy statement said. “Officials from U.S. Embassy Kyiv are currently working with authorities to determine the circumstances of the death.”

We are heartbroken to report the death of an American member of the U.S. Embassy Kyiv community. Officials from U.S. Embassy Kyiv are currently working with authorities to determine the circumstances of the death.

— U.S. Embassy Kyiv (@USEmbassyKyiv) September 30, 2020

US embassies also host a multitude of federal agencies, some in covert or clandestine capacities. Though the majority of personnel are State Dept. Foreign Service, such as diplomats, usually CIA and others like the Defense Intelligence Agency (the DoD’s civilian intelligence arm that works closely with the Pentagon) also operate out of foreign embassies.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog, originally posted at The Asia Times,

Beijing has a plan to become the indispensable tech core of East Asia, linking ASEAN, Northeast Asia and even both Koreas…

Let’s cut to the chase: with or without a sanction juggernaut, China simply won’t be expelled from the global semiconductor market.

The real amount of chip supply Huawei has in stock for their smart phone business may remain an open question.

But the most important point is that in the next few years – remember Made in China 2025 remains in effect – the Chinese will be manufacturing the necessary equipment to produce 5 nm chips of equivalent or even better quality than what’s coming from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Conversations with IT experts from Russia, ASEAN and Huawei reveal the basic contours of the road map ahead.

They explain that what could be described as a limitation of quantum physics is preventing a steady move from 5nm to 3nm chips. This means that the next breakthroughs may come from other semiconductor materials and techniques. So China, in this aspect, is practically at the same level of research as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Additionally, there is no knowledge gap – or a communication problem – between Chinese and Taiwanese engineers. And the predominant modus operandi remains the revolving door.

China’s breakthroughs involve a crucial switch from silicon to carbon. Chinese research is totally invested in it, and is nearly ready to transpose their lab work into industrial production.

In parallel, the Chinese are updating the US-privileged photo-lithography procedure to get nanometer chips to a new, non-photo lithography procedure capable of producing smaller and cheaper chips.

As much as Chinese companies, moving forward, will be buying every possible stage of chip manufacturing business in sight, whatever the cost, this will proceed in parallel to top US semiconductor firms like Qualcomm going no holds barred to skirt sanctions and continue to supply chips to Huawei. That’s already the case with Intel and AMD.

Huawei’s game

Huawei for its part is investing deeply in a very close R&D relationship with Russia, recruiting some of their best tech talent, notoriously strong in math, physics and rigorous design work. An example is Huawei’s purchasing of Russian face recognition company Vocord in 2019.

Some of the best tech brainpower in South Korea happens to be Russian.

Huawei has also established a “5G ecosystem innovation center” in Thailand – the first of its type in ASEAN.

In the medium term, Huawei’s strategy for their top notch smart phones – which use 7nm chips – will be to hand over the business to other Chinese players such as Xiaomi, OPPO and VIVO, collect patent fees, and wait for the inevitable Chinese chip breakthrough while keeping production of 5G equipment, for which it has sufficient chips.

Huawei’s Harmony OS is considered by these IT experts to be a more efficient system than Android. And it runs on less demanding chips.

With the expansion of 5G, most of the work on smart phones can be handled by cloud servers. By the end of 2020, at least 300 cities across China will be covered by 5G.

Huawei will be concentrating on producing desktop computers and digital displays. These desktops will come with a Chinese processor, the Kunpeng 920, and run by a Chinese Unified Operating System (UOS).

UOS is a Linux system developed by China’s Union Tech and commissioned by Beijing to – here’s the clincher – replace Microsoft Windows. These desktops will not be sold to the general public: they will be equipping China’s provincial and national administrations.

It’s no wonder a steady rumor in IT circles is that the best bet ahead would be to put money in a Chinese Chip Investment Fund – expecting to collect big time when major tech breakthroughs happen before 2025.

The East Asian tech core

Whatever the trials and tribulations of the chip war, the inescapable trend ahead is China positioned as the indispensable tech core of East Asia – encompassing ASEAN, Northeast Asia, and Eastern Siberia linked to both Koreas.

This is the hard node of the incoming Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the biggest free trade deal in the world – which is bound to be signed by 2021.

India has opted for self-exclusion from RCEP – which in geoeconomic terms condemns it to a peripheral role as an economic power. Compare it to South Korea, which is boosting its integration with ASEAN and Northeast Asia.

East Asia’s tech core will be at the heart of a global production chain integrating the very best in science and technology conception and the very best production specialists scattered around all nodes of the global supply chain.

That’s a natural consequence, among other factors, of East Asia introducing patent applications at a multiple of 3.46 times the US.

And that brings to the very special Samsung case. Samsung is increasing its R&D drive to in fact bypass US-branded technologies as soon as possible.

When South Korea’s President Moon turbo-charges his appeal for the official end of the Korean War that should be seen in tandem with Samsung eventually reaching a wide-ranging tech cooperation deal with Huawei.

This pincer movement graphically spells out South Korean independence from the American bear hug.

It does not escape the Beijing leadership’s attention that the emergence of South Korea as a stronger and stronger geopolitical and geoeconomic actor in East Asia must be inextricably linked to access by China to the next generation of chips.

So a crucial geopolitical and geoeconomic process to watch in the next few years is how Beijing progressively attracts Seoul to its area of influence as a sort of high-tech tributary power while banking on the future of what would be a Korea Federation.

This is something that has been discussed every year, at the highest level, at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

Wang Huiyao of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization notes how China and South Korea already have a free trade agreement and “will start the second phase of negotiations to establish a new mechanism for China-South Korea economic cooperation, which is developing fast.”

The next – immensely difficult – step will be to set up a China-Japan free trade mechanism. And then a closer, interconnected China-Japan-South Korea mechanism. RCEP is just the first step. It will be a long sail all the way to 2049. But everyone knows which way the wind is blowin’.

Three weeks ago, when we first reported that JPMorgan – the bank that this week was slammed with a record settlement of nearly $1 billion when it admitted it had manipulated and spoofed the gold and Treasury markets – was probing its employees’ role in abuse of PPP funds following reports of “instances in which Covid-relief funds were misused by customers and is probing employees’ involvement in the potentially illegal activities”, we said that it was about time the role of banks was put under the microscope because ” while it was easy to blame the administration for rushing to hand out hundreds of billions in grants/loans (without which the US economy would still be in a depression), a key question is how and why did the private banks that were gatekeepers for all this capital, allow such abuse to take place.“

A few days later, we also found out that not only did JPM employees allegedly enable fraud by clients when obtaining PPP loans, the largest US bank also found that some of its employees themselves “improperly applied for and received”, i.e. stole, Covid-relief money that was intended for legitimate U.S. businesses hurt by the pandemic.

The bank discovered the actions, which were tied to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, “after noticing that suspicious amounts of money had been deposited into checking accounts owned by bank employees.” The findings prompted an unusual all-staff message from JPMorgan Tuesday which according to Bloomberg “puzzled many across the industry for its candid admission of potentially illegal acts by some of its own while not describing what they had done.”

At the time, JPMorgan sent a memo to its roughly 256,000 employees in which senior leaders said they had seen “instances of customers misusing Paycheck Protection Program Loans, unemployment benefits and other government programs” and that some employees had fallen short on ethical standards, too.

JPMorgan tried to mitigate this discovery by claiming that only a handful of its employees were abusing the program.

Well, fast forward to today, when we learn that more than 500 JPMorgan employees got assistance from taxpayers aimed at helping businesses through the pandemic “and dozens of them shouldn’t have”, according to Bloomberg.

The discovery that so many people at the largest and most profitable U.S. bank had tapped the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program raised suspicions inside the company and set off a hasty probe, the full extent of which hasn’t been previously reported.

Upon discovering that “hundreds of employees” – clearly not the brightest ones as they used checking accounts operated by their employer into which they deposited funds meant for struggling Americans – had received government funds in their accounts, JPMorgan “began scrutinizing director-level employees and workers who received certain amounts.” Of almost two dozen in that first group, the bank found that at least five – none of them director-level employees – had improperly tapped the program, one of the people said. We say at least because every update on this issue reveals that more and more employees had illegally tapped the taxpayer-funded program.

Amusingly, the bank concluded that of the hundreds of deposits many were “probably” legitimate – providing funds, for example, to side businesses run on workers’ own time, although how a JPM banker would have a “side” business that suddenly needs emergency funding is probably left best for the upcoming Congressional hearings.

JPM’s findings of illegal employee activity come amid a broader sweep of individual accounts that received business aid. On July 22, the SBA warned banks to be on the lookout for suspicious deposits or activity as part of the EIDL program. The SBA’s inspector general has also flagged evidence of fraud in the program, saying it identified more than $250 million in aid given to potentially ineligible recipients as well as $45.6 million in possibly duplicate payments. A Bloomberg analysis of SBA data last month identified $1.3 billion in suspicious payments.

As a result, prosecutors have brought charges against more than 20 businesses for fraud under the CARES Act, which authorized the PPP loan program, and a recent report by the House Committee on Oversight suggested that there could have been billions of dollars worth of fraud in the PPP program. Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, called on the inspectors general of the U.S. Treasury Department and SBA to investigate the program.

“The SBA does not comment on individual borrowers. Evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse with any of SBA’s loan programs is not tolerated and should be reported. … The SBA successfully distributed 5.21 million loans and $525 billion to small businesses in an unprecedented amount of time, through the Paycheck Payment Program,” the SBA said, misstating the name of the Paycheck Protection Program.

“This is going to be the biggest fraud in government history, the magnitude of which we will not know for many years to come,” said Vic Hartman, a former FBI agent and author of a 2019 book about fraud based on lessons from his career.

In retrospect, it’s most surprising that only 500 JPMorgan bankers were involved.

 

Authored by Jeff Harris via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

I remember watching Walt Disney’s film Dumbo’s Feather as a kid. Released in 1941 the story is about a cute baby elephant born with huge ears and forced to perform as a Circus clown. Dumbo is befriended by a mouse who confidently proclaims Dumbo can use his big ears to fly if he will only hold a magic feather in his trunk.

Leaping off the high-dive platform with his magic feather Dumbo indeed flies! But he soon discovers the feather isn’t magic at all because he could fly without it.

So what does this have to do with the mobs obedient wearing of face mask to ward off the “deadly” Covid virus? You know, that deadly virus that is so incredibly virulent that according to the CDC 99.8% of those exposed to it survive? 

It’s true, I’m not a psychiatrist, I don’t even play one on TV. I’m throwing this out there as a kind of thought experiment for your consideration. The mask mandates have been in force for about six months. Instead of giving ostensibly “free” people the option of choosing to wear face mask of their own volition (as in Sweden) the politicians totally ignored citizen’s rights and ordered lockdowns, social distancing, sheltering in place, and the public humiliation of worthless face masks.

Now you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to simply observe the behavior of the masses. At least in my neck of the woods virtually everyone in public places is obediently wearing a face mask. We were initially told this was to “flatten the curve” and would only be necessary for a few weeks.

But somehow, those few weeks have been extended and extended by power mad governors and mayors into six long months. Interestingly the CDC, WHO and other “experts” proclaimed people shouldn’t wear face masks early on, but then bizarrely changed their minds all of a sudden?

Back to Dumbo

So what does this have to do with Dumbo’s Feather? Well think about it. Human beings are a superstitious lot and made more so when the mainstream media pumps 24/7 fear porn about an invisible “deadly virus” that is all around us! “Millions will die if they don’t obey the expert’s guidance!”

It stands to reason that for many people who’ve obediently worn their face masks and haven’t gotten sick, they could easily assume the mask is their “magic feather” that’s protecting them and saving their very lives! “See, I’ve been wearing my mask and haven’t gotten sick; it must work!”

Just like a lucky rabbit’s foot, or a four leaf clover tucked in one’s pocket, I suspect face masks have become a psychological crutch for the masses. This is psychological terrorism by government criminals! Human’s forced to endure extended traumatic experiences are much easier to manage as was discovered by government scientist back in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Omnipresent, debilitating fear is the primary tool governments use to control the masses. The mask is a highly valuable tool in the fear arsenal as it’s a ubiquitous, visual reminder that death lurks all around us! “Don’t take any chances, wear your mask, obey the rules, do what you’re told and everything will be OK.”

That’s the message. After all, these government folks are only interested in what’s best for us, right? Well no, they do NOT have our best interests at heart, only their power, control and the wealth they can wring out of us.

H. L. Mencken, the witty American Journalist hit the nail on the head over half a century ago:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I suspect that even if by some miracle the “authorities” suddenly announced Covid was contained and we could return to normal life, millions would willingly continue wearing their mask. When humans have been deeply traumatized by fear of an untimely death they don’t get over it quickly.

The scars are deep and for many will never heal. How ironic that the mask is not only a visual cue to remain fearful but also a beacon of hope for those who equate it with their avoiding illness to date; their magic Dumbo’s Feather.

In a free country one gets to choose for themselves if they want to wear a mask, stay home, stop working, quit attending church or take baths in bleach water for that matter! So is the USA a free country; I think not! I will not comply!

The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, has devised an interesting strategy for getting rid of crusading SJW employees, like the rebellious workers creating headaches for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not being “woke” enough.

Pay them to leave.

Citing an internal email to employees, CNBC’s Kate Rooney reports that Armstrong offered employees severance packages of 4-6 months if they felt uncomfortable with the company’s policy of political neutrality in the workplace. In the note, Armstrong cited “internal strife” at companies like Facebook and Alphabet as a threat to “value” at Coinbase.

“While I think these efforts are well-intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division,” Armstrong said.

The announcement comes after Armstrong clarified the company’s stance on office activism, saying that he preferred employees left political discussions and activities to their off-hours.

For anybody who absolutely can’t tolerate this arrangement (or simply wants a few months of free pay, at the cost of losing their job in the middle of an economic downturn) the company is offering severance packages, so that anyone “who doesn’t feel comfortable with this new direction” can simply leave.

Pay packages will range between 4 to 6 months, depending on seniority of the employee. That’s not bad, but not great, as far as Silicon Valley exit packages go. But it’s certainly enough to last a skilled engineer until they land a new gig.

He finished with a positive spin: “Life is too short to work at a company that you aren’t excited about,” Armstrong said in the email, which was previously reported by The Block. “Hopefully this package helps create a win-win outcome for those who choose to opt out.”

As CNBC pointed out, the approach stands in stark contrast to the prevailing sentiment in Silicon Valley, which is to encourage employees to speak their mind, even when it might endanger the company’s bottom line.

Will Coinbase’s policy catch on? Or will they need to follow Peter Thiel and (maybe) Elon Musk out of the Bay Area.

Submitted by Philip Fischer, founder of eBooleant Consulting, LLC; previously he was Managing Director, Head of Fixed Income And Municipal Bond Strategy, Global Bank & Markets, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Years before this pandemic began, I gave a speech at the Library of Congress in Washington DC on “Science and the Literary Imagination.” It was an exploration of the ways in which the limits of literary thought were stretched by the possibilities introduced by scientific discovery.

Now, I think it is timely to think how this era of great scientific discovery has stretched the risk and return potentialities in economics. The growth of the tech giants makes the return potential clear. But the scientific risk component of systemic risk is also clear.

There should be no doubt that I favor the acquisition of scientific knowledge and in any event, we have little, if any, ability to keep the Genie in the bottle. But the acquisition of knowledge creates new states of nature to price. These include genetic manipulation and air conditioning.

Here we should note that discoveries are discoveries specifically because they are uncorrelated with current events. As such, scientific discoveries are unhedgable. In my last blog entry, I commented on the role that pandemics play in inducing mass migrations. Whether this virus itself is a “natural” or man- made disaster remains unresolved. The pandemic, however, was clearly facilitated by the amalgamated collection of technology facilitating its spread. And the role of technology in this cycle of municipal depopulations needs to be considered carefully in light of the many discoveries made in recent years.

They are leaving because they can

The press is replete with stories about the exodus from major American cities. And has been so for a long time. A September 2019 Forbes article “New Yorkers Are Leaving The City In Droves: Here’s Why They’re Moving And Where They’re Going” seems almost quaint now.¹ The Mayor of New York was trying to run for President of the United States while the moving vans were going into overdrive on the East Side of Manhattan. Much of the interstate migration was the product of tax policy in the blue states.  And that was in the good times.

And, then as now, economists disregarded the depleting populations of the large American population centers. “It has long been a tenet of municipal finance that residents so love their cities that they are largely indifferent to their taxes. This is belied by the experience of the past two decades.”²

While a few places like New York City and Boston have managed to buck the general malaise, most cities in the Northeast and North Central United States have faced a multigenerational decline. In fact, the Census Department’s graph of the center of the US population, illustrates as well as any, the relentless thrust of the population west and south.

While the westward shift of the population occurs for many reasons, we are concerned with one particular item. That is the role of technology in the decline of the Eastern states. And here one invention is particularly relevant. While there are many places where air conditioning drove demographics, the deserts of the Southwest for example, it is in the East where its impact is most relevant. The invention of air conditioning was an important factor in the Eastern cities losing their relative advantage to the South. 

Perhaps the best example was Washington DC where the adoption of air conditioning was a significant factor in converting a sleepy southern city into a governmental mega city.⁴

And the analog to air conditioning this time is telecommunications. Those leaving the cities add the ability to work remotely to the increasing taxes and decreasing quality of life in deciding whether to return. Municipal finance needs to respect the change in technology. It adds another credit negative to these cities.

A discussion of municipal credit and technology can be very extensive and there will be a plethora of topics to consider in this blog. Nevertheless, we should note the point I made at the Library of Congress. Science imposes a discipline in our risk analysis. Ordinarily in financial analysis the black swans, low probability events, are just that, unlikely. In a more rigorous sense, however, we have to consider that discovery shortens our time horizon. In the limit, if innovation is fast enough, we are driven to say that if it is now possible that something can happen, it must happen.

* * *

[1] New Yorkers Are Leaving The City In Droves: Here’s Why They’re Moving And Where They’re Going
[2] Schramm, Carl. “Save America’s Dying Cities.” Issues in Science and Technology 36, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 62–70. https://issues.org/americas-dying-cities-carl-schramm-revitalizing-competitiveness/
[3] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2010/geo/center-of-population-1880-2010.html
[4] Air-Conditioning Comes to the Nation’s Capital, 1928–60, Joseph M. Siry, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2018) 77 (4): 448–472. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2018.77.4.448

In what scientists have billed as the first major analysis of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in a developing country, a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science shows that a small number of “super spreaders” caused as much as 2/3rds of infections in India.

The data was gathered over months while tracing more than 3 million contacts in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

Until recently, most of the research on the virus came from the US, Europe and China. But with India set to surpass the US as the world’s largest outbreak over the next 2 weeks or so, the research has arrived at a critical time. It shows that roughly 8% of confirmed cases later led to 2/3rds of the outbreak.

With India teetering on the cusp of passing 100,000 deaths – it would be the third country to top that number after the US and Brazil – Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy and author of the study, said in an interview with Bloomberg that his research marks the first time that scientists have had granular data allowing them to actually map the spread of the virus from contact to contact in two Indian states.

But on the flip side, the researchers found that 71% of infected people never passed the virus to anyone.

“We’ve never had this degree of information to say, hey, some people are really transmitting the virus in a massive way,” Laxminarayan said in an interview. In contrast with the super-spreader minority, 71% of confirmed cases whose contacts were traced weren’t found to have spread the virus to anyone.

Data for the study were gathered by thousands of contact-tracers during the lengthy lockdown imposed by the Indian government.  Almost 130 million people live in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Combined, their population represents roughly 10% of all of India. Both states reported their first infections on March 5. The data examined ended on Aug. 1.Now, India has nearly 6.25 million confirmed cases of the virus.

Source: Science

Health workers traced the spread using the same skills they’ve used to trace the spread of HIV and tuberculosis. In settings like public transit, coming into close contact with an infected person could carry as high as a 79% risk of infection.

One notable finding of the study was the role that younger people played in spreading the virus. In the two Indian states, children under the age of 14 often “silently” spread the virus to their parents and family members.

An analysis of the risks for different age groups found that the rate of mortality for the youngest cohort was 0.05% for ages 5 to 17. On the other end of the spectrum, the mortality rate hits 16.6% for people aged 85 and up.

 

Read the full paper below:

Science.abd7672.Full by Zerohedge on Scribd

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

The head of the UN World Food Program repeatedly warned us that we would soon be facing “famines of biblical proportions”, and his predictions are now starting to become a reality.  We have already seen food riots in some parts of Africa, and it isn’t too much of a surprise that certain portions of Asia are really hurting right now.  But I have to admit that I was kind of shocked when I came across an article about the “hunger crisis” that has erupted in Latin America.  According to Bloomberg, “a resurgence of poverty is bringing a vicious wave of hunger in a region that was supposed to have mostly eradicated that kind of malnutrition decades ago”. 

We are being told that food shortages are becoming acute from Mexico City all the way down to the southern tip of South America, and those that are the poorest are being hit the hardest.

Let me ask you a question.

What would you do if you didn’t have any food to feed your family?

Fortunately, for the vast majority of my readers that is just a hypothetical question.  But for many families in Latin America, the unthinkable is now actually happening…

He couldn’t feed his family. Matilde Alonso knew it was true but couldn’t believe it. The pandemic had just hit Guatemala in full force and Alonso, a 34-year-old construction worker, was suddenly jobless.

He sat up all alone till late that night, his mind racing, and fought back tears. He had six mouths to feed, no income and no hope of receiving anything beyond the most meager of crisis-support checks — some $130 — from the cash-strapped government.

I once had a friend that is a hardcore prepper tell me that his worst nightmare would be for his daughter to tell him that she was hungry and he didn’t have anything to give her.

Many of us can’t even imagine being in Matilde Alonso’s shoes.  Sadly, this is going to be happening to even more families soon, because the UN World Food Program is projecting that the number of people facing “severe food insecurity” in Latin American and Caribbean nations will rise by a whopping 270 percent in the months ahead.

Thankfully, for the moment the United States is in far better shape.  But there have been serious shortages of certain items throughout this pandemic, and many grocery stores have had a very difficult time trying to keep their shelves full.

For example, during my most recent trip to my local grocery store I noticed more empty shelves than I had ever seen before, and that greatly alarmed me.

And now we are being told that grocery stores all over the country are attempting to stockpile goods in an attempt “to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus”…

Grocery stores across the United States are stocking up on products to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus.

Household products – including paper towels and Clorox wipes – have been difficult to find at times during the pandemic, and if grocery stores aren’t stocked up and prepared for second wave this winter, runs on products and shortages could happen again.

When even CNN starts admitting that more shortages are coming, that is a sign that it is very late in the game.

And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some chains are actually putting together “pandemic pallets” in anticipation of more shortages…

According to the Wall Street Journal, Associated Food Stores has recently started building “pandemic pallets” to ensure cleaning and sanitizing products are readily available in its warehouses to prepare for high demand through the end of the year.

“We will never again operate our business as unprepared for something like this,” Darin Peirce, vice president of retail operations for the cooperative of more than 400 stores told the outlet. If grocery stores sense something is coming and are preparing for another “wave” of this scamdemic, it may be something worth taking note of.

Most of these grocery chains believe that another wave of COVID-19 is the worst case scenario that they could possibly be facing.  Sadly, that isn’t even close to the truth.

We have entered a time when global food supplies are going to become increasingly stressed, and it is going to be absolutely critical to keep U.S. food production at the highest levels possible.

Unfortunately, U.S. farmers have been going bankrupt in staggering numbers during this downturn, and the federal assistance that was supposed to help them survive has mostly gone to “large, industrialized farms”…

Five months into the pandemic, farmers say the federal payments have done little to keep them afloat, as these favor large, industrialized farms over smaller family farms. In fact, initial payments under the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program – which provided $16 billion in direct support and $3 billion in purchases – revealed an uneven distribution of financial aid.

An NBC News analysis of the first 700,000 payments showed how corporate farms and foreign-owned operations received over $1.2 billion in coronavirus relief – or over 20 percent of the money – with average payments of almost $95,000. Smaller farms, meanwhile, had average payments of around $300. The figures did not take into account other struggling farmers who are ineligible for assistance.

Reading those numbers greatly frustrated me, because family farms have always been so critical to our success as a nation.

U.S. farm bankruptcies hit an eight-year high last year, and they are on pace to go even higher this year.

This should deeply alarm all of us, because we are going to need as much food production as possible during the years to come.

In 2020, we have just seen one major disaster after another all over the world, and many of these disasters have directly affected global food production.  For example, in my previous articles I haven’t even mentioned the historic flooding that has been going on in China for months that is wiping out crops on a massive scale…

Experts from the global financial services group Nomura said that although the flooding is among the worst that China has experienced since 1998, it could still get worse in the weeks to come, with the nation poised to lose $1.7 billion in agricultural production.

However, since the start of the monsoon season, the area of flooded croplands have almost doubled. Nomura’s estimates also do not include the potential loss of wheat, corn and other major crops. Therefore, China could be facing a far greater economic loss than current projections.

On my news headlines website, I am going to start posting stories like this on a daily basis so that people can keep up with what is really going on out there.

We really are facing a very serious global food crisis, and the number of people without sufficient food is only going to grow as the months roll along.

For now, most Americans still have plenty of food, and we should be very thankful for that.

But everyone should be able to see that global conditions are rapidly changing, and we should all be using this window of opportunity to prepare, because very, very challenging times are ahead of us.

In an interesting choice of venues, Bill Gates has just published his latest editorial in the Nikkei Asian Review, the English-language flagship of the Japanese financial publishing and data giant. In it, the billionaire Microsoft founder argues that the US and its European allies should dedicate more government funds for guaranteeing supplies of vaccines for poorer countries, which don’t have the wherewithal to strike deals like the $2 billion agreement that Washington struck with Pfizer.

Hoarding supplies of vaccines isn’t just wrong, Gates argues, it’s counterproductive – since the only way we can truly eradicate COVID-19 is to vaccinate everyone, in every country.

But it’s not just a question of donating supplies. The Western world and its leading corporations must collaborate with government to start ramping up supply chains to ensure that production of billions of doses of the vaccine can be produced quickly once emergency approval has been granted.

Because we can immunize against the disease, governments will be able to lift social distancing measures. People will stop having to wear masks. The world’s economy will start running again at full speed.

But elimination will not happen by itself. To achieve this goal, the world first needs three things: the capacity to produce billions of vaccine doses, the funding to pay for them, and systems to deliver them.

Right now, most of the world’s supply of COVID-19 vaccines is slated to go to rich countries. These nations have been making deals with pharmaceutical companies, securing the right to buy billions of doses as soon as they are produced.

But what about low- and lower-middle income nations of the world, everywhere from South Sudan to Nicaragua to Myanmar? These nations are home to nearly half of all human beings, and they do not have the purchasing power to make big deals with pharmaceutical companies. As things stand now, these countries will be able to cover, at most, 14% of their people.

To support his case, Gates cites new modeling from Northeastern projecting that the death toll will be twice as high if vaccines aren’t widely distributed in the developing world.

New modeling from Northeastern University helps illustrate what will happen if vaccine distribution is so unequal. The researchers there analyzed two scenarios. In one, vaccines are given to countries based on their population size. Then there is another scenario that approximates what is happening now: 50 rich countries get the first two billion doses of vaccine. In this scenario, the virus continues to spread unchecked for four months in three quarters of the world. And almost twice as many people die.

This would be a huge moral failing. A vaccine can make COVID-19 a preventable disease, and no one should die from a preventable disease simply because the country they live in cannot afford to secure a manufacturing deal. But you do not even have to care about fairness to see the problem with the “rich-country-only” scenario.

As Gates claims: The only way to eliminate the threat of SARS-CoV-2 anywhere, is to eliminate it everywhere.

Fortunately, corporations like Pfizer and Gilead are collaborating to ramp up supplies not just of vaccines, but of therapeutics like Gilead’s remdesivir.

Remarkable progress has already been made on this front when it comes to therapeutics. Pharmaceutical companies have agreed to expand drugmaking capacity by using each other’s factories. remdesivir, for example, was created by Gilead, but extra quantities will now be produced in Pfizer factories. No company had ever allowed its factories to be used by a competitor in this way, and now we are seeing similar cooperation when it comes to vaccines.

In addition to the manufacturing capacity to make them, we also need the funding to pay for billions of vaccine doses for poorer nations. This is where the ACT Accelerator can help. It is an initiative supported by organizations like Gavi and the Global Fund. Not many people have heard of them, but they have spent two decades becoming experts in the task of financing vaccines, drugs, diagnostics.

After all, trying to “shame” developed countries for simply trying to protect their citizens isn’t a strategy.

The best way to close this vaccine gap is not by shaming rich countries. They are doing something perfectly understandable — trying to protect their people. Instead, we need to vastly increase the world’s vaccine manufacturing capacity. This way, we can cover everyone no matter where they live.

While President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” handed billions of dollars to vaccine developers, Gates claims that the UK and Japan, which have both publicly promised to set aside vaccine supplies for poorer nations, should be emulated by other western nations – cough, the US, cough.

But it’s not enough to simply manufacture the vaccines, an endeavor that would likely cost billions upon billions of dollars. The west should help the developing world create a network of on-the-ground health-care workers around the world to help administer the vaccines, and report any new threats of zoological transmission.

The United Kingdom is a good model for what other wealthy nations should do. It has donated enough money for the Accelerator to procure, probably, hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for poor countries. So do countries like Japan. The Japanese government was the first advanced economy to announce a public commitment of 17.2 billion yen ($16 million) on Sep. 15 to secure doses for poorer nations.

But more are still needed. I hope other nations are as generous.

Finally, even when the world has the manufacturing capacity and funding lined up, we will need to strengthen health systems – the workers and infrastructure that can actually deliver vaccines to people around the world.

There is a lot of be learned from the ongoing effort to eradicate polio. One of the most famous photos of the polio eradication effort in India was of a line of health workers. They were carrying vaccine coolers over their heads as they waded through waist-deep floodwaters to reach a remote village. Spotting COVID-19 cases in the poorest parts of the world will take a similar network of primary health workers – one that can reach places where even roads cannot. With good diagnostics, these workers can also sound the alarm if another disease jumps from a bat – or bird – to a human.

There are, in effect, three parts to Gates’ plan, as he teases in the headline: vaccines are the only solution (not “herd immunity” – God forbid), going “global” is the only right way to do it, and – most importantly – more public money is needed to make it happen.

Typically, self-interest and altruism require opposite behaviors, but in this rare case, Gates argues, the altruistic thing is also an act of self-interest, since the only way we can eradicate COVID-19 would be to ensure the entire world is vaccinated, spending public money on vaccines bound for poorer nations makes sense.

In other words, in eliminating COVID-19, we can also build the system that will help reduce the damage of the next pandemic.

One thing I have learned studying the history of pandemics is that they create a surprising dynamic when it comes to self-interest and altruism: Pandemics are rare in cases where a country’s instinct to help itself is tightly aligned with its instinct to help others. The self-interested thing and the altruistic thing — making sure poor nations have access to vaccines — are one and the same.

And by building a global on-the-ground health-care network, we will be able to detect the next killer virus before it becomes a pandemic.

To sum up: Americans don’t need all those vaccines! They’re not even going to take them! Maybe the federal government should turn supplies over to the Gates Foundation and WHO, which are already working on expanding access to vaccines.

Wait a second: Didn’t President Xi say China was going to provide vaccines to the entirety of the developing world as part of its quest to “atone” for unleashing the virus in the first place?

As Asian markets open for the start of Q4 trading, Japanese markets have hit a ‘glitch’ resulting in the halting of all buying and selling of securities.

Tokyo Stock Exchange operator Japan Exchange Group said in a statement:

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your exceptional support for the operation of the Securities Market on this exchange.

Today, there is a failure to deliver market information, and we are pleased to let you know that we will stop buying and selling all stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

At the same time, it is not possible to accept orders from that time.

Recovery is currently undecided, but we will contact you again about future plans.

Seems like it’s a system-wide issue:

• *NIKKEI, TOPIX ARE NOT TRADING DUE TO SYSTEM ISSUE

• *JPX: TOSTNET ALSO NOT EXECUTING TRADES

• *JAPAN SAPPORO EXCHANGE ALSO HALTS TRADING

• *JAPAN NAGOYA STOCK EXCHANGE ALSO EXPERIENCING SYSTEM ISSUES

Nikkei futures are modestly lower with the halt…

And Yen is weaker…

What will the BoJ do when it can’t buy Topix ETFs?