Shocking Simulation Shows Single-Cough Spreading Cloud Of COVID-19 Across Supermarket 

Shocking Simulation Shows Single-Cough Spreading Cloud Of COVID-19 Across Supermarket 

Researchers from Aalto University, Finnish Meteorological Institute, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and the University of Helsinki have published a terrifying simulation of how coronavirus particles spread from a single cough in the air and disperse across several aisles at a supermarket. 

“Someone infected by the coronavirus, can cough and walk away, but then leave behind extremely small aerosol particles carrying the coronavirus. These particles could then end up in the respiratory tract of others in the vicinity”, Aalto University Assistant Professor Ville Vuorinen said. 

Jussi Sane, the Chief Specialist at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, said the model exemplifies why people who are sick must abide by the public health orders to stay at home. 

“Based on the modeling of the consortium, it is not yet possible to directly issue new recommendations. However, these results are an important part of the whole, and they should be compared with the data from real-life epidemic studies,” Sane adds.

The model could suggest that supermarkets are breeding grounds for the virus as people rush to these indoor facilities to panic hoard food. It also makes sense why outbreaks on cruise ships are rapid. 

Last month, a new report outlined how the virus could stay in the air for at least 30 minutes and travel up to 14 feet. 

There’s growing evidence that people need to start wearing face masks. The only problem: 3M N95s are sold out across the world. 

Last week, the US government reversed its previous position on masks, issuing new guidance that people in public places need to wear them. President Trump has yet to require masks, but some local governments have issued stricter rules. 

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser said all shoppers entering grocery stores in the Washington Metropolitan Area must wear masks, indicating that stores will enforce the new measure. 

The shocking simulation of how a COVID-19 carrier’s cough creates an aerosol cloud of the virus would suggest that mask-wearing will be the new normal for people across the world until a vaccine is seen. 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 11:40

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Buchanan: Trump’s Presidency Hangs On One Decision

Buchanan: Trump’s Presidency Hangs On One Decision

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Easter may not bring America the victory in the war against the coronavirus pandemic that President Donald Trump anticipated. But in this Holy Week, we may be reaching our Saratoga moment, our turning point.

While New York state reported a record number of deaths from the virus on Tuesday, over 1,800, new hospitalizations were down.

Referrals of patients to ICUs were down. Intubations were down. And the discharge rate for patients from hospitals was holding steady.

The thousands of ventilators Gov. Andrew Cuomo had been crying out for are, apparently, not immediately needed. The U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort moored on the Hudson with a capacity of 1,000 beds remains largely empty. So, too, are the thousands of beds in Manhattan’s Javits Center, which has been converted into an emergency hospital.

“We are flattening the curve,” exulted Cuomo on Wednesday, “Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”

Predictions of 1 million to 2 million U.S. deaths are no longer heard.

Last week’s projection from the White House briefing room of 100,000 to 240,000 dead has been revised, sharply downward.

Tuesday, Dr. Deborah Birx said the model she is working with projects 81,000 deaths. By Wednesday, that had dropped 25% to an estimated 60,000 U.S. deaths.

A terrible toll, still more than all the Americans who died in the Vietnam war, but compared to earlier estimates, hopeful news.

Social distancing and sheltering in place are working.

California, Oregon and Washington have begun to ship medical equipment to states where infections are still surging.

Moreover, it appears that some deaths being attributed to COVID-19 were caused by underlying conditions patients had when they came to the hospital, such as cancer, heart disease, hypertension, pneumonia, diabetes, asthma.

Yes, this could be a false dawn. We are warned of the possibility that the coronavirus, after cutting its initial murderous swath by August, could revisit us in the fall with a new season of lethal attacks.

But by then, we may have developed vaccines or drugs to prevent, mitigate or even cure the disease.

What appears conclusive now is this: The American people and nation are aware, fully engaged in the fight, and, on several fronts, gaining the whip hand over the pandemic.

Hence, understandably, consideration is being given to resuscitating the U.S. economy before this nationwide shutdown plunges America into a full-blown depression that exacts its own toll of premature deaths.

Upon this question now, the Trump presidency appears to hang:

Will Trump’s actions flatten the curve and put the pandemic on an irreversible downward course in daily cases and deaths, as he produces a U-turn, if not a V-turn, dramatically driving the economy upward from depression and toward national prosperity?

Can he revive the economy without reviving the virus?

Or will the coronavirus so severely cripple the economy that the depression it produces will kill the Trump presidency?

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie framed the issue thus: “Politically, nothing else matters. … I have never seen a time when an opponent is more irrelevant. And that’s not an insult to Vice President Biden.

“But in the end, the American people are going to decide, has the president of the United States stood up to this crisis, and done right by them and protected their lives and their property, or hasn’t he?”

Trump’s true adversary in this election is not Joe Biden, the hermit candidate sheltering in place. Biden is but a name on the November ballot you mark if you want to remove and replace Donald Trump.

Trump’s real antagonists are the media who detest him and are determined, having failed to impeach and remove him, to drive him from office by portraying him as a foolish, failed president in the worst crisis to hit the country since Pearl Harbor.

The crucial decision Trump will make is to choose the exact moment to reopen the country and the economy, without igniting a new spike in the pandemic that induces despair and causes a panic.

The president’s aides in charge of the medical crisis want the longest delay possible. His economic and political advisers, fearing Trump could be forced to run as Herbert Hoover did, at the nadir of a new depression, want an earlier decision to start opening up the country.

Action cannot long be delayed if we are to survive the medical crisis only to endure a longer and more costly economic crisis.

Thursday morning, jobless claims revealed that another 6.6 million Americans had lost their jobs, bringing to 16.7 million the number who have filed for unemployment in just three weeks.

One in 10 Americans is now out of work.

Six weeks ago, Trump was boasting, and justifiably so, of having the greatest economy of any president in recent memory. Now, the possibility exists that he could go into the fall election with the worst economy since Hoover and the Great Depression of 1932.

Trump’s decision, which will determine the fate of his presidency, is likely close at hand.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 11:15

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“Everyone Is Blameless”: Missed Rent & Mortgages Could Spell Real Estate Catastrophe For ‘Months Or Years’

“Everyone Is Blameless”: Missed Rent & Mortgages Could Spell Real Estate Catastrophe For ‘Months Or Years’

Previously we described that over 30% of US renters didn’t pay their April apartment rent as the fallout of coronavirus-induced mass unemployment claims continues to ripple across various key sectors. Despite that some tenants will receive temporary protection from evictions “by a patchwork of federal and local laws” the reality is that as unpaid rents pile up, so will mortgage defaults as landlords struggle to satisfy their obligations – which will in turn affect fixed-income investments backed by said mortgages.

On the commercial side, Bloomberg estimates that about $81 billion in commercial rent comes due on average each month, but of course this is anything but a typical month, resulting in “The delay of a sizable portion of that will put an enormous strain on the complex systems for financing real estate and highlight how quickly the pain caused by social distancing has spread,” as Bloomberg observes.

The domino effect presents the broader question of not only carnage across real estate financing, but lasting pain felt for the individual home-owners: “It won’t be much better for homeowners. Roughly 15 million households — about 30% of mortgage borrowers — could miss payments if the economy stays shuttered through the summer, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.”

File image via Summit Real Estate

The report casts a dire long-term outlook, underscoring that local, state and federal initiatives to temporarily halt all foreclosures and evictions will not be enough based on a policy aimed at “pausing” punitive measures a mere month or two

“The initial thinking behind it seems like it was that this is going to last a month or two, and things will go back to normal,” says Tomasz Piskorski, a professor at Columbia Business School, who favors forgiving some interest payments for affected mortgage borrowers. “It buys us some time. But it’s going to take months or years to get back to a new normal.”

But Americans will have to pay the piper eventually even if in this crisis they perceive that ‘everyone is blameless’.

“Rents must be paid eventually, and landlords will have claims even in bankruptcy. In cases where businesses shut down because of government order, tenants will pursue claims of force majeure, arguing that their contractual agreement has been superseded by social-distancing decrees. Landlords may make the same case to lenders,” Bloomberg describes of what’s coming.

Via Bloomberg/CoStar Portfolio Strategy

But the music has to stop somewhere.

The blameless nature of the crisis could make some problems easier to solve, lowering resistance to government bailouts. A bigger challenge may be mustering a strong response during a crisis in which officials worldwide have repeatedly been slow to take decisive action.”

“It’s almost like we’re watching this unfold in slow motion,” Scott Rechler, CEO of RXR told Bloomberg. “We know the bad part is coming, but we don’t know how long it will last or how resilient we’ll be.”


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 10:50

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Robertson: This Is The Market’s “Last Call” For Investors

Robertson: This Is The Market’s “Last Call” For Investors

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The first quarter was one for the record books. The fastest drawdown on record was immediately followed by the steepest recovery since the Great Depression. The wild swings sent investors’ heads spinning and were all the more unsettling because they came with virtually no warning.

This turbulence didn’t just come out of nowhere, however. The seeds were set in an environment excessively permissive of debt that provided a remarkably fragile foundation for market advances. Investors who appreciate this will have a much greater chance of successfully navigating the bumpy road ahead. Investors who don’t will struggle to preserve what they have.

To be sure, the proximate cause of the turmoil in the first quarter was the spread of the coronavirus and the public policy measures implemented to contain it. To focus on this, however, is to miss the more important structural condition of excess leverage. Jim Grant assessed plainly in his April 3, 2020 letter: “the volume of credit came to exceed the country’s legitimate demand for credit.”

For investors keeping score at home, excessive debt was also a huge problem in the 2008 financial crisis. Unfortunately, very little changed since then. Household debt declined somewhat, but corporate and sovereign debt exploded. There never was a “beautiful” deleveraging.

Kiril Sokoloff captured the landscape in an interview with Real Vision dated March 27, 2020:

“There is a huge amount of leverage in the system, because everyone was trying to squeeze out a profit or getting some return. The pressure to generate profits was massive, and you had to use leverage to do it.”

Debt apologists claim that low rates make debt affordable. While this is technically true, it is also disingenuous. The reason is that affordability is context specific. If that context covers only a very narrow set of potential conditions, then it is unlikely to be representative over longer investment horizons.

Debt is affordable if payments are low relative to income but is not affordable if income falls dramatically and/or there are no reserves to cover the payments when income falls short. This is the underlying problem that the coronavirus has exposed: Almost overnight, debt levels for many companies (and individuals and countries) have transformed from being affordable to being unaffordable.

As a result, debt does matter because higher levels of debt reduce one’s resilience to changing circumstances. Further, the longer your time horizon stretches out, even if the environment seems benign, the more likely some catastrophic event is going to happen. This is exactly why engineers design bridges to withstand a “100-year flood” regardless of the conditions when the bridge is built.

For debt holders, adverse conditions are comprised of any set of factors that reduce cash flow needed to stay current on debt payments and/or reduce the value of assets that were financed by the debt. When defaults on debt do occur, the result is that money (and therefore liquidity) is destroyed.

When defaults are highly correlated, the risk can be systemic and substantial amounts of liquidity can erode quickly. This happened when home prices fell in the mid-2000s and is happening again today. The situation was illustrated nicely by Michael Lebowitz and Jack Scott. They described that the loss of liquidity arising from defaults creates “a hole the Fed is trying to fill.”

Today, those “holes” are appearing in more and different places. The potential for significant defaults exists in emerging market debt, corporate debt, global supply chains, securitizations, and other areas.

For example, Luke Gromen notes in his March 20, 2020 edition of Tree Rings, “A terrifying ‘sudden stop’ in capital flows is happening across Emerging Markets”. Zoltan Pozsar and James Sweeney of Credit Suisse describe: “supply chains are payment chains in reverse. When the flow of parts, components and assembly is interrupted, so is the flow of payments in the other direction.” Further, the Economist highlights that “10-20% of all American corporate debt (bonds and loans) is owned by more esoteric vehicles such as collateralised-loan obligations and exchange-traded funds”.

The widespread and urgent need to procure US dollars to pay these various debts have caused liquidity expert, Michael Howell of CrossBorder Capital to declare:

“These shocks have unhinged the global financial system, probably permanently, and look to have finally destroyed the consensual post-WW2 settlement.”

This is a powerful statement. It says the effects of the coronavirus have tipped the delicate scales of the financial system out of balance in a fundamental way. The economic and financial damage will be meaningful.

Seth Godin laid it out bluntly: “We’re going to need to pay. All of us. To pay for the dislocations and to pay for the treatment and to pay for the recovery.” In short, the investment environment has suddenly become far more turbulent and difficult to navigate.

This will radically reset priorities and will require a radically different mindset for leaders and investors alike. Godin provided a good sense of this by way of generational differences. He said, “My generation was the dominant voice for sixty years. A voice that worried about the next 24 hours, not the next 24 years.” He concludes, “That’s about to shift, regardless of what year you were born.”

Interestingly, Kiril Sokoloff described a very similar phenomenon: “So the players who were successful in the last decade, the last 30 years, it may just be a totally different game, and I’m not sure what it is … I just have an intuition that the world is going to change, and we have to change our game plan.”

A key element of the different mindset that will be required, and one that has enormous implications for investors, is perspective. From a long-term perspective that incorporates historical norms as well as a wide range of things that can possibly happen, the credit crisis and subsequent market turbulence in the first quarter were wholly unsurprising. A stock market built on a foundation of ever-growing debt was an accident waiting to happen; it was a matter of “when”, not “if”. In other words, the wild swings experienced in the first quarter were just a predictable function of living with such enormous excesses.

A number of investors don’t have a broad enough perspective. They may take comfort in a “long-term” orientation, for example, but most standard asset allocations were designed with the last forty years in mind and not for an “unhinged the global financial system”. Further, many common approaches are implemented with passive strategies that can be sorely tested in adverse conditions. Finally, many approaches are not prepared to adapt to such fundamentally different circumstances.

Other investors have almost no perspective at all. These investors assume that the natural state of affairs is for the market to go up every year. Selloffs are rare but transient experiences. Events in the first quarter came out of nowhere and were unusually nasty, but essentially par for the course. Failing to appreciate underlying structural issues, such investors are programmed to buy the dip. The risk, as Sokoloff illustrates, is that “there’ll be maybe fake rallies and people will buy it, and then short it, and it will be whipsawed around.” The lesson from the Great Depression, however, was: “it wasn’t a crash where people lost money. He was trying to buy the many false bottoms.”

The increased relevance of perspective represents an important changing of the guard of investment approaches. Operating with a 24-hour time horizon and adjusting quickly when adversity arises will not solve the bigger structural issues that are pressing with ever-greater intensity. Doing so will lead to a misdiagnosis of conditions that will be punished far more severely than it has in the past. As Godin characterizes the changes:

“Emergencies are overrated as a response mechanism. Preparation and prevention are about to become a more popular alternative.”

With the ideas of perspective and preparation and prevention in mind, there are several useful points to consider as the second quarter unfolds.

Clearly the monetary and fiscal policy machines are ramping up quickly to the potential for numerous debt defaults. While it is foolish to forecast the effect of public policy with too much specificity, there are some general patterns emerging can help to handicap outcomes.

For one, the scale of spending is already massive and there is a good chance it will get even bigger. Rabobank’s Michael Every summed up the monetary response:

“The reality is that the Fed is now providing backstops for pretty much everything save for President Trump’s beloved Dow Jones index.” 

Russell Napier addressed the same issue in the April 3, 2020 Grants letter: “Government interventions in banking systems at the bottom of bear markets are not uncommon.” However, Napier also acknowledged the unusual scale of this intervention:

“Government interventions to bail out an entire commercial system or portion of the commercial system, in my opinion, are entirely novel. That changes the nature of this bear market for anybody in the capital structure. The more important question now is under what terms and conditions does government capital arrive.

This highlights another hugely important issue for investment decisions. The programs implemented thus far almost guarantee uneven distribution of support. The Fed’s decision to purchase investment grade corporate debt (but not non-investment grade debt), for example, highlights the diminishing role of free markets in determining the price and quantity of capital as well as the role of the government in determining which businesses succeed and which ones do not.

Another important aspect of announced policies is that they provide support, but they do not fix any problems. Forbearance of rents and forgiveness of payroll expenses can buy some time and prevent an immediate meltdown, but they don’t do anything to restructure bad debts. Nor do currently announced policies make any provisions for investing in projects that can generate higher future growth.

Finally, an inherent characteristic of any public policy is uncertainty. In the best of times, the outcomes of public policy measures are uncertain. In less settled times, the level of uncertainty related to the reaction function to such policies and the nature and duration of unintended consequences expands dramatically. The short answer is that there are no silver bullets and it will take time to assess and address the economic and financial damage. In investment terms, this means a higher cost of capital.

Another implication for investors is that small businesses are more vulnerable than larger businesses. Agustin Carstens from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) highlighted this point: “Central bank interventions to quell the crisis need to reach the individuals and businesses who are ultimately affected. The last mile of this channel is not yet in place and the gap needs to be bridged urgently.” The early days of the CARES Act are already demonstrating Carstens’ concern that the transfer of funds will be uneven at best.

As a result, there is likely to be even greater inequality. Since many of those with the highest propensity to spend will be hit hardest, discretionary spending is likely to fall and that will cause disproportionate economic harm. Longer term, the trauma of coping with severe economic adversity may even foster higher savings rates.

It is also important to remember that these economic and financial effects are also being felt all over the world. China is over-leveraged and many countries are having trouble servicing debt. Argentina just defaulted again. This is not a situation in which any country “wins” but rather one in which some countries fall into the abyss and “lose” before others. The bigger picture takeaway is that prevailing forces are likely to be deflationary for some time.

Collectively, thee factors describe an environment that is generally not conducive for increasing long-term exposure to stocks. Further, there have not yet been many company updates through the crisis so it is fair to assume that much of the news from first quarter earnings reports will be bad. As the economic impact becomes more apparent and gets discounted into stock prices, there will start to be opportunities for those scouring the landscape with capital ready to deploy.

In one sense, the market turbulence in the first quarter provided something like a “last call” for investors. On one hand, investors can embrace an approach that favors perspective and preparation. This worked well to insulate investors from the greatest ravages of the selloff and to position them for future opportunities. On the other hand, investors can continue to chase markets in a landscape that they don’t understand with tools that don’t work. Either way, the guard has changed.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 10:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2y9Q4P5 Tyler Durden

Dramatic Footage Shows Home Owner Fight Off Home Invaders In Fatal Confrontation

Dramatic Footage Shows Home Owner Fight Off Home Invaders In Fatal Confrontation

Next time somebody tries to tell you that you don’t need a gun to secure your home, show them this video.

It was a normal day for one homeowner in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. When the doorbell rang, he assumed his landscapers had arrived, and opened the door.

However, the masked men standing outside weren’t his landscapers. They pushed their way into the house, carrying a bag of zip ties and a blow torch. Doorbell footage that later leaked to the Internet shows the two would-be robbers, Bradley Finnan, 39, of Chattanooga, Tenn. and Larry Brodacz, 58, of another nearby suburb, pushing their way into the house, followed by the sounds of a scuffle indoors.

20 seconds later, Finnan can be seen running out of the house, with the homeowner in pursuit. The homeowner can be seen tackling, then brutally pummeling Finnan with his fists, while shouting for help from his neighbors. Finnan gets away, but trips, and was later taken into custody by police.

However, his partner wasn’t so lucky.

What happened exactly isn’t clear, but at some point, the homeowner managed to fatally shoot Brodacz. The two home invaders appeared to not b

Now, Finnan has been charged with home invasion and murder (since, in most states, if someone is killed in commission of a felony their accomplices are held responsible for the killing) by prosecutors in Cook County.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 10:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3e4LdPM Tyler Durden

Former Flynn Defense Counsel “Just Now Found Additional Docs” In File

Former Flynn Defense Counsel “Just Now Found Additional Docs” In File

Via SaraACarter.com,

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s previous defense team turned over recently discovered emails and handwritten notes Wednesday to his new counsel, suggesting that the delay in turning over the documents were due to technical issues since being ordered by the presiding federal judge six months ago to turn over all documents.

On July 25, 2019 presiding Federal Judge Emmet T. Sullivan, ordered the well-known law firm of Covington and Burling LLP to ‘promptly turn over the entire file’ on Flynn to his new defense attorney Sidney Powell. The order was made under threat of a hearing before the District of Columbia Ethics Counsel. The law firm turned over what is described as a ‘voluminous’ amount of documents but it apparently wasn’t all the documents.

On Wednesday, the law firm turned over more documents and suggested in a supplemental notice filed with the court that there may be even be more documents not yet produced.

“In reviewing materials in response to the Court’s March 6, 2020 Order (Doc. 174) to respond to Mr. Flynn’s specific allegations in his Supplemental Motion to Withdraw Plea of Guilty, however, we have found emails and two pages of handwritten notes that were not previously transferred to successor counsel,” the notice submitted by Flynn’s former lawyers Robert Kelner and Stephan P. Anthony stated.

“With respect to the emails, this appears to have resulted from errors in the process of collecting and searching electronic materials that were not contained in the working case file. The two pages of notes appear to have been inadvertently missed during the file transfer process.”

Flynn’s new defense team is combing through the new trove of documents, suggesting that the appropriate action by the DOJ would be to dismiss Flynn’s case entirely based on egregious government misconduct.

“It’s an interesting new production of documents from the Flynn file. It will be even more interesting to see what the firm has to say about them. We are really looking forward to a hearing in court on all the issues that will exonerate General Flynn,” said Powell, who spoke to SaraACarter.com.

“Meanwhile, the government still refuses to produce the original 302 and the DOJ memo of January 30, 2017 that exonerated him of any Russia issue, and it still refuses to dismiss the case because of the egregious government misconduct from the inception of this persecution—including slipping an FBI Agent secretly into a presidential briefing in August 2016—before the election—to collect information on nominee Trump and General Flynn,” she added.

The country and Justice would be best served if the DOJ would take responsibility for these outrageous actions and the deliberate attempted destruction of an honorable man. The agents who interviewed him knew he was honest with them.  They later altered the 302 until it was approved by Andrew McCabe.”

Last week, a status report was filed by prosecutors to delay the anticipated April 3 status report hearing to April 24. Justice Department prosecutors contend that the documents provided by Flynn’s former legal counsel “are voluminous, span numerous topics that arose during Covington’s 30-month representation of Mr. Flynn, and include many pages of sometimes difficult-to-decipher handwritten notes.”

“The government needs additional time to digest this information and any additional information that Covington may provide,” the status report stated.

“In order to allow the government adequate time to review the materials that have been produced and to request, receive, and review any follow-up information or documents, the government respectfully asks this Court to allow the government three additional weeks to provide a further status update and, if feasible, a proposed briefing schedule,” the prosecutors stated.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 09:35

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War-Torn Yemen Confirms First COVID-19 Case, Official Says Brace For ‘Millions’

War-Torn Yemen Confirms First COVID-19 Case, Official Says Brace For ‘Millions’

Throughout five years of war Yemen has been considered by the UN and health agencies to be the ‘world’s worst humanitarian disaster’ — but few Americans have heard much about the war or its over 100,000 dead, including tens of thousands of civilians, given that it’s the US-Saudi coalition doing the bombing.

But now Yemen is about to rip back into the headlines, given the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the country, with health officials fearing “one million” could be infected if the outbreak takes hold in the war-torn country.

This as already some 25 million civilians are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including basic food, medicines, and other staples. The Saudis have essentially imposed a complete land, sea and air blockade of the country for years. Its health system also long ago collapsed.

Some rises after Saudi coalition bombing in Saada, Yemen. File image source: Reuters.

“The first confirmed case of coronavirus has been reported in Hadramout province,” Yemen’s supreme national emergency committee for COVID-19 reported Friday.

“The committee said medical teams and concerned authorities had taken all necessary precautions and promised to release further details on the coronavirus case later Friday,” Al Jazeera reports. “The victim was a Yemeni working in the port of al-Shihr, a local official told Reuters news agency.”

And an official for the the Houthi-led government in Sanaa, Taha Al-Mutawakel, issued a dire warning

“If the epidemic enters Yemen, we will need one million beds in just two months,” he told lawmakers, as quoted by local media, warning that in the worst-case scenario, up to 28 million people – around 90 percent of Yemen’s population – could be infected in “weeks.”

He reported there’s a mere 1500 beds in hospitals across the country even capable to be begin treating potential COVID-19 victims after years of war. 

AP file image

Yemen has also recently witnessed periodic outbreak of cholera and other deadly diseases over unsanitary conditions due to war and a collapsed economy. Closer to the start of the war over 500,000 got cholera in 2017 alone, according to the WHO.

As of Thursday the Saudi-led coalition claims to have initiated a ceasefire in Yemen after getting a call from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who more broadly has been urging an an “immediate global ceasefire” in order to prevent spread of the disease in war-torn regions and vulnerable refugee camps around the world. 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 09:10

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Mexican Standoff Continues: AMLO Claims US-Mexico Oil Deal At G-20, OPEC+ Denies Knowledge

Mexican Standoff Continues: AMLO Claims US-Mexico Oil Deal At G-20, OPEC+ Denies Knowledge

After last night’s dramatic Mexican standoff, headlines this morning are as confused and disorienting as ever.

In a speech delivered from Mexico City, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) told the G-20 that it has a new deal… and the ‘standoff’ is over.

AMLO began by noting that it’s very difficult to cut output (just as it is for every nation we suspect) and explained how he has managed to reverse a 14-year decline in oil production.

Mexico will cut production by 100,000 barrels a day, as it argued for yesterday, and the U.S. will make an additional contribution of 250,000 barrels a day.

As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas notes, AMLO gave no indication of what the “contribution” of 250,000 barrels a day from the U.S. means – it could be an undertaking to buy that volume of Mexican crude for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Either way, it seems there’s a diplomatic fudge, with lots of creative math, to unlock the deal.

“It’s a done deal,” AMLO said.

The only problem with all this “we have a deal” talk…

Several OPEC+ delegations were completely unaware of AMLO’s “deal” with the group, delegates tell Bloomberg’s Javier Blas, who adds that AMLO claims he reached a deal with Trump and immediately informed OPEC+ at 7:30 p.m. yesterday.

“Now they know how we are contributing.”

It seems very unclear whether any deal has been agreed to… and furthermore, if Mexico has moved in any way from its position overnight (a 100k cut – which is around a quarter of the 400k cut that OPEC has demanded.. or is the US “contribution” supposed to make up for that?).

Did Trump, following his “great call” with Putin and MbS overnight, tell AMLO top say anything just to get a deal done? The question now is will the Saudis back down and accept whatever fudged compromise Trump, Putin, and AMLO may have cooked up?

And, as we noted last night, if Mexico is granted this exception, then all other OPEC members – at least the non-Saudi ones – would demand similar treatment, forcing Saudi Arabia to should all of the production cuts, which would then nearly double from 4MMb/d to 8MMb/d.

While futures markets are closed across the world on this Good Friday, IG’s spread markets (as illiquid as they may be) are open, and there has been negligible reaction to these headlines so far…

Source: IG

Which makes perfect sense since, as Goldman’s Damien Courvalin explains, even if the cuts were agreed today, it would still be too little and too late to prevent a decline in prices in coming weeks as storage capacity becomes saturated.

First, the equitable c. 23% country level cuts used by OPEC+ (instead of the typically higher core-OPEC share) allows for a large headline cut but also implies lower compliance.

Second, it leaves the effective voluntary cuts too small to avoid breaching storage capacity, ensuring that low oil prices force all producers to contribute to the market rebalancing with some of the shut-ins likely to prove persistent, creating a faster oil rebalancing.

Ultimately, this simply reflects that no voluntary cuts could be large enough to offset the 19 mb/d average April-May demand loss due to the coronavirus. Such an outcome was already visible today, with the large Cushing crude inventory build reported by Genscape driving a further collapse in May-June WTI timespreads to -$6.0/bbl.

We expect further weakness in WTI timespreads and crude prices in coming weeks, with downside risks to our short-term $20/bbl forecast (especially if a deal is not reached).


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 09:08

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Global Coronavirus Death Toll Nears 100k As Thousands Die In Britain & America: Live Updates

Global Coronavirus Death Toll Nears 100k As Thousands Die In Britain & America: Live Updates

The number of new coronavirus cases confirmed worldwide climbed at a rate of roughly 85k overnight yesterday, a rate that was roughly consistent with the prior two days. That would lead scientists to believe that the global outbreak might finally have “plateaued” – word that’s been thrown a lot lately.

Unfortunately, while the number of new cases remained stable, deaths in the US and UK continued to climb. But while thousands of families bid a distant farewell to their loved ones, the Fed’s latest intervention – couched as a lifeline for small business – has sent badly beaten junk bonds on their strongest daily rally since 2009 as spreads collapsed.

Now that the Fed has apparently extinguished credit risk from the market, ensuring that thousands of “zombie” firms will continue to borrow at extremely attractive rates, allowing them to lumber on through another day as ‘moral hazard’ is extinguished. What’s worse, almost, is that no one seems to care.

With markets around the world closed for Good Friday, and millions of Christians around the world observing the holiday while stuck inside their homes, the biggest story of the day is the fact that the global death toll will likely top 100k before midnight on the East Coast of the US. Roughly 17k – about 20% – of those deaths are from the US.

Then again, it’s extremely likely that the true number of deaths has already passed that number, as more reports are finding that Americans are almost certainly being left out of the counted dead, just like many Italians and Chinese probably were.

With Easter just two days away, the notion of reopening the American economy before the holiday now seems laughable. But with millions of Americans struggling to hang on without their jobs or the unemployment promised by states, Congress and the president, the administration appears to still be working diligently on its plan to start reopening the economy by the beginning of next month.

The news was met with the same hysterical warnings by health experts and anxious liberals insisting that a “premature” reopening would be disastrous because restrictions have barely had time to work. Of course, these sample people spent Thursday celebrating the wisdom of Dr. Anthony Fauci after he lowered his expectations for American fatalities by 75% from 240k to just 60k.

We’re not trying to criticize the good doctor, or assign blame; we’re merely trying to make the point that starting to plan out the eventual reopening of the economy is probably prudent, and by May 1, most of the US will have been shut down for almost 6 weeks. Even with money from the government, the $1,200 stimulus checks plus ramped up unemployment benefits still won’t be enough to save millions of Americans from the worst effects of the coming depression.

In New York, deaths have soared over the past week, but the unfortunate upside of that is that space in the city’s hospitals has opened up pretty rapidly. The Javits Center, which has been converted to a COVID-19 hospital, is almost empty, as is the USNS Comfort, the Navy ship docked at Manhattan’s Pier 90. While contract workers have been brought on the bury the dead victims on Hart Island, Cuomo says that the curve may already be starting to flatten – but, of course, that doesn’t mean we should let up on the social distancing measures.

Elsewhere, the feud between Taiwan and the WHO is getting so bitter as the NGO continues to ignore the amazing success Taiwan has had containing the outbreak. President Trump’s harsh words for the WHO have prompted many Taiwanese to praise Trump, even as American liberals – the same ones who purportedly supported the Hong Kong protesters – cringe. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has accused the Taiwanese government of trying to smear him.

Meanwhile, in the latest sign that the Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach to handling Iran is working, the regime said it plans to accelerate the privatization of certain state-run assets as the Trump administration moves to block $5 billion of IMF aid that it has asked for.

As Japan confronts a surprising resurgence in new cases, it’s looking like it’s not the only East Asian nation having trouble containing the outbreak as a ‘second wave’ looms over the Continent. Even as Abe struggles against the strictures of the Japanese Constitution, which protects individual liberty to an extremely high degree, a big data analysis shared by WaPo shows Tokyo’s state of emergency (a state of emergency has been declared by Abe in 7 prefectures, but most of the restrictions are voluntary) is having an impact on life in one of the world’s busiest cities. But it’s still far from having the kind of effect needed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Malaysia has once again extended its national lockdown for two weeks as the country tries to slow the rate of coronavirus infection. As a result of this second extension, the restrictions on daily life and business will run until April 28. At 4,346, Malaysia has the highest number of confirmed cases in southeast. Asia and counts 70 deaths. Indonesia, meanwhile, reported 219 new cases of coronavirus and 26 new deaths, bringing its confirmed-case total to 3,512 and 306 deaths. The Indonesian government has already publicly acknowledged lying about the outbreak, and it’s extremely likely that the virus is far more widepsread in the country of more than 200 million.

In Spain, figures released on Friday showed that 15,843 people have died so far after contracting coronavirus in the country, with 605 of them in the last 24 hours. That compares with a peak of 950 daily deaths just over a week ago and is the lowest death toll for over two weeks. But such figures are likely to undercount the number of mortalities, since they include only proven rather than probable cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by coronavirus.

Before we end, as Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot tries to convince residents of her hard-hit city to follow the ‘social distancing’ directives, she shared a story with one interviewer about personally breaking up what she described as “an underage drinking party” on the North Side of the city.

“We pulled by and I told the driver, ‘Back up,’ [and] rolled down the window,” she said, before telling the group: “Hey, you’re too close. Separate yourself. Social distancing!'”

 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 08:59

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2xbKRqa Tyler Durden

Wall Street Has Now Morphed Into A Full Blown Soviet Sausage Factory

Wall Street Has Now Morphed Into A Full Blown Soviet Sausage Factory

Via Global Macro Monitor,

To paraphrase the police officer who told me my old neighborhood had burned down during the 2017 NorCal fires,  “the markets are no more.”

After the Fed announced it is bailing out junk bonds today,  Wall Street has now morphed into a full-blown  “Soviet Sausage Factory.

Jay Powell probably had no choice and needed to blunt the blow of another 6 million-plus print of new unemployment claims but isn’t Socialism and state intervention dandy?

We can understand providing support to local and state municipalities,  now strapped with severe cash flow problems as their tax revenues have gone to near zero,  but junk?

You know, like many of the same companies that levered up to buy back shares while shitting all over their employees or, say, the wildcat and shale-oil drillers?   Even Jed Clampett and Ellie May understood Texas Tea is risky business.  Come on, man.

Chapter 11 and debt restructurings are not only the right thing to do but the only thing to do lest we lose an entire generation to stagflation and a zombie economy. 

That’s probably the best case unless the economy miraculously snaps back, which assumes the economy was structurally sound before the virus took it out.   We seriously doubt that.

Here’s to hoping the bailouts are just a bridge to a major economic restructuring with the long-needed structural reforms.

Waste Of Time

There’s no sense in wasting time analyzing the markets anymore.

We will sit on cash and gold, hope and pray the virus soon passes, and try and tune out this shit show until the major political dislocation that is surely coming on the other side.

“No One Will Fail”

Just heard a trader on CNBC say, “no one will be allowed to fail…earnings don’t matter…nothing matters.”  Oh. My. God!

Wasn’t it just a few months ago the government was going after the young who were falling behind in their student loan payments?

Example: Judy has weekly disposable pay of $300. Based on the minimum wage calculation, she definitely gets to keep $217.50. The government can then take the lesser of the amount his income exceeds $217.50 ($300 – $217.50 = $82.50) or 15% of his income (15% of $300= $45.00). Since $45.00 is less than $82.50, this is the amount the government can take each week from Judy’s wages.

– SLBA

Gosplan Setting Prices Now

Most asset prices are no longer determined by market forces — which has been the case for many for some time — but now set by our new Gosplan along with the local Commissar of Free Money, just like the price of eggs way back in the USSR.

I never ever wanna hear from the self-righteous, ignorant ideologues parading as economists again,

“Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity to Socialism….blah, fucking blah.”

How twisted and sick is our society that the grocery clerks making $12-15 per hour working on the frontline, risking their lives and getting sick to feed us and the 10 percent now profiting from these government bailouts (88 percent of stocks are owned by the Top 10 percent)?

But, wait for it…their thousand dollar check is in the mail.

Come on, folks, give these people a big, as in Bengie big or a large fraction thereof, tip the next time you’re out.  I have no doubt many of you already do and will continue until this plague passes.

A note from a Bernie Bro,

“In 2016, they told me if I voted for Bernie, the nation would move closer to authoritarianism,  managed trade, MMT, and socialism.  I voted for Bernie and man were they right.” 

– Bernie Bro


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/10/2020 – 08:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RrXqEB Tyler Durden