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Shocking videos have surfaced on social media, show the chaos that unfolded on Saturday evening at a park in Louisville, Kentucky, where a man opened fire on demonstrators who had gathered to protest the death of Breonna Taylor, reported The Epoch Times.

At least one person was killed, and another injured at Jefferson Square Park around 9 pm, the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) said in a statement, adding that shortly after gunshots rang out in the park, sheriffs arrived on scene to conduct life-saving measures on a male who eventually died. A second shooting victim was found at the Hall of Justice near the park, who suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

Just about 9 p.m., there were reports of shots fired in Jefferson Square Park. Calls then came in that Sheriff’s Department personnel were in the park performing life-saving measures on a male who eventually died at the scene.

— LMPD (@LMPD) June 28, 2020

Videos of the incident were posted on social media, several uploaded to YouTube, show a man opening fire at the perimeter of the park. He unloaded a clip into the demonstration area – as he fired the third round, it appears someone returned fire with a larger caliber weapon. At the end of the video, one of the shooting victims was bleeding on the ground. A man dressed in all black wielding an AR-15 or a variant of the rifle was seen in the final seconds of the clip – still, there’s no conclusive evidence of who returned the fire. 

LMPD said an investigation into the shooting was launched immediately: 

 “We’re trying to gather as much information as possible to identify all who were involved in the incident.” 

Mayor Greg Fischer tweeted: “I am deeply saddened by the violence that erupted in Jefferson Square Park tonight, where those who have been voicing their concerns have been gathered… “It is a tragedy that this area of peaceful protest is now a crime scene.”

The park has been the epicenter of demonstrations in Louisville for weeks after the police killings of Taylor and George Floyd. 

“Praying for our city,” tweeted Kentucky state Rep. Charles Booker on Saturday night. 

Authored by John E. McNellis, Principal at McNellis Partners, via WOLF STREET:

“I have 2 options that are non-negotiable.

• I’m going bankrupt (chapter 7). Covid happened and I cannot survive. I’d rather not go through bankruptcy because it ruins my credit, but if I have no choice, I won’t think twice.

• The second option is to let you keep my deposit, and take what I have in the bank which is around 10k. Again this is non-negotiable.

That is all I freakin have.”

This tenant’s sad bankruptcy threat sets the table for examining our retail – supermarket-anchored neighborhood shopping centers – in the Covid-19 era. Embellishing only slightly, we have two kinds of tenants: those that can’t pay and those that don’t wish to.

In short, bricks and mortar retail has been caught in a pincer movement, flanked on one side by Covid-19 itself, and on the other by its cure. You know this already: The virus separated us, the cure institutionalized that separation, forcing a societal shutdown that has driven us into our deepest recession in perhaps living memory, a recession that seems certain to run several years. The coronavirus means we will remain wary of one another until there’s a vaccine, perhaps longer; the cure means the majority of Americans will have little to spend.

What does this portend for our retailers? Putting aside kids swarming the beach towns, few of us wish to take more risks than necessary. Driving on a freeway entails an infinitesimal risk, but we do it to get somewhere; going shopping now involves a minute risk, but we accept it if the shopping is essential. (As an aside, we had no idea we were in the essential retail business until this year.)

Our essential retailers—supermarkets, drug stores, banks, convenience stores and gas stations—are doing fine; in fact, groceries and gas are killing it. Someone’s idea of essential, liquor stores and cigarette shops, are not complaining either.

As evidenced by the poor fellow who wrote the impassioned plea above, our problem is with the small shop tenants in our centers. Using a broad brush, you can divide small tenants into three principal categories: personal services, food, and the sellers of stuff (whether hard goods like cellphones or soft like clothing).

The winners among these categories are those that can address our fears (distancing) and our pocketbooks (cheap). Using these two fixed points, navigating retail is fairly straightforward.

Personal services – beauty shops, nail salons, drycleaners, massage parlors, yoga studios and gyms, etc. – win on cheap, but lose on distancing. Fortunately for some – notably, hair and nails – essential trumps distancing; these shops will come back swiftly. Others, like dry-cleaning and massage, are less essential and will take time to regain their pre-Covid levels.

Finally, there’s the sweat subcategory: small gyms, bike spinning parlors, yoga studios, etc. Absent an amazing vaccine, these tenants may be in serious trouble. You can’t make money at 50 percent maximum capacity and you’ll never convince some meaningful percentage of your customers that they’ll be safe dodging sweat in a tightly packed room.

Following the distancing/cheap lodestone, food shapes up like this: drive-throughs are golden, traditional take-out (e.g. pizza) is rocking, and those restaurants that can successfully ramp up their take-out should be fine.

You may have noticed that some ethnic foods—like Asian and Indian—hold up well on home delivery; others, particularly those with complicated menus, do not. The hardest hit in this category will be higher-priced small restaurants, the charming little shoulder-to-shoulder bistros with candlelit decor. Simply put, they cannot afford to run at 50 or 75 percent maximum capacity; they lose on both distancing and cheap.

By the way, the coronavirus didn’t create retail’s larger problem—excess capacity—it merely pulled its curtains back. According to Forbes, we have roughly 50 square feet of retail space per capita in the USA while Europe has just 2.5 square feet. Washington DC has a restaurant for every 103 residents, while San Francisco has one for every 201 residents. That’s a lot of competition.

Because of this, we anticipate losing a number of our restaurants and restructuring rent for others. But that goes just so far. The catch is that a successful restaurant only pays its landlord somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of its sales in rent. This means that even if we were to give our space to a restauranteur, she still couldn’t make it if her sales don’t approach their pre-Covid levels.

On to stuff. The sellers of essential stuff like eyeglasses, laptops and cell phones will be fine; it would take the Ebola virus itself to keep people away from Apple. But, let’s face it, few things are truly essential.

And stuff is where distancing and cheap diverge.

Price hardly matters if the stuff helps you bear distancing, especially if it lets you do something fun inside or, even better, outside. Best Buy’s stock is up 59 percent from its crisis depth; people are buying electronics to make home confinement tolerable. And bicycles and camping gear are flying off the shelves.

Back to cheap. Not that it ever went away—the “dollar” stores have been thriving for years—but the selling cheap-stuff-cheap phenomenon will only grow more universal thanks to our surging unemployment levels.

Bringing this home: To date, we’ve permanently lost half-dozen retailers, from restaurants to clothing to massage. Tenants who in effect said, sue me, I’m taking a hike. To compound this unpleasantness, it would be fair to say that replacement shop tenants are just behind spotted owls on the endangered species list. But if there is a safe harbor in retail, it’s a supermarket center in a good residential neighborhood. Without plan or compass, we happened to bob into that harbor years ago.

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Under Armour has notified the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that it will explore options to terminate its multi-million dollar apparel and shoe deal with the university, the Baltimore-based apparel company said in a statement Saturday, reported USA Today.

In May 2016, Under Armour and UCLA inked one of the largest sports deals in American collegiate history, worth $280 million over 15 years. The deal went into effect in 2017 and ended UCLA’s partnership with Adidas.

Under Armour’s statement read: 

“Under Armour has recently made the difficult decision to discontinue our partnership with UCLA, as we have been paying for marketing benefits that we have not received for an extended time period. The agreement allows us to terminate in such an event and we are exercising that right,” the statement read per ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg. 

“We know that this has been a challenging time for athletes, sports programs and performance apparel brands alike. Under Armour will continue to preserve our strength in this challenging environment, while maintaining a strong network of partnerships with individuals, organizations and leagues that make us the on-field authority for focused performers.” 

In response, UCLA released a statement addressing Under Armour’s actions:  

“UCLA Athletics learned this week that Under Armour is attempting to terminate its 15-year apparel and footwear contract with us and the Bruin community. We are exploring all our options to resist Under Armour’s actions. We remain committed to providing our hard-working staff and student-athletes with the footwear, apparel and equipment needed to train and compete at the highest level, as they — and our loyal Bruin fans —deserve,” the statement read per Rittenberg. 

While Under Armour claims it has not ‘received marketing benefits’ from the UCLA deal – one of the reasons behind the plan to terminate the contract is because the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the company. The company’s turnaround plan (initiated in pre-corona times) has failed to boost revenue – as sales are expected to plunge this year compared with last. 

And it’s not just the sports apparel company that has fallen into financial hardships – UCLA Athletics recorded an $18.9 million budget deficit in January, just months before the virus pandemic canceled spring sporting events. 

More via The Los Angeles Times on why the Under Armour deal bankrolls UCLA’s sports programs: 

As part of the agreement, Under Armour paid UCLA $15 million up front in addition to roughly $11 million per year in rights and marketing fees. The apparel company also agreed to supply the school with an average of $7.4 million in clothing, shoes and equipment each school year while contributing $2 million over an eight-year span toward athletic facility upgrades.

Last week, Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, unloaded his Washington, D.C. mansion at 41% below asking place. 

It remains to be seen if Plank will dump his 189-acre property in Glyndon in Baltimore County, called Sagamore Farm, worth around $20 million. 

Under Armour attempting to terminate its UCLA deal, failed turnaround plan, restructuring and layoffs, and collapsing revenues; this all suggests the sports apparel company is in rough shape. 

Authored by Mark Hemingway via RealClearPolitics.com,

Following accusations of widespread fraud, voter intimidation, and ballot theft in the May 12 municipal elections in Paterson, N.J., state Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced Thursday he is charging four men with voter fraud – including the vice president of the City Council and a candidate for that body.

With races still undecided, control of the council hangs in the balance. Paterson is New Jersey’s third largest city and the election will decide the fate of a municipal budget in excess of $300 million, in addition to hundreds of millions more in education spending and state aid.

In the City Council election, 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections. Due to the pandemic, Paterson’s election was done through vote-by-mail. Community organizations, such as the city’s NAACP chapter, are calling for the entire election to be invalidated.

Mail-in ballots have long been acknowledged by voting experts to be more susceptible to fraud and irregularities than in-person voting. This has raised concerns from President Trump and other Republicans about the integrity of national elections in November, which are expected to include a dramatic increase in mail-in ballots. If Paterson is any guide, it ought to concern Democrats as well.

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together – including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.

The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed.

“We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said.

“This is corruption. This is fraud.”

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

Two of the election results in Paterson were particularly close. Initially, challenger Shahin Khalique defeated incumbent Mohammed Akhtaruzzaman by 1,729 votes to 1,721. After a second recount on June 19, that race is now tied 1,730-1,730. In that race, a video posted to Snapchat has surfaced that appears to show a man named Abu Razyen unlawfully handling a large stack of ballots he indicates are votes for Khalique. Khalique’s brother, Shelim, and Razyen have been charged by the state attorney general for crimes including fraud in casting mail-in votes, tampering, and unauthorized possession of ballots.

Incumbent council member William McKoy lost by 240 votes to challenger Alex Mendez after a recount on June 1. However, the McKoy-Mendez race is far from over – in the third ward of the city where the race was decided, over 24% of all ballots were disqualified by the Board of Elections. Mendez was also charged Thursday with six different crimes related to voter fraud. (Michael Jackson, Paterson’s incumbent 1st Ward city councilman and council vice president, was the fourth man charged yesterday. Jackson faces four counts related to voter fraud.)

In a legal complaint, the McKoy campaign is alleging outright fraud on behalf of the Mendez campaign. “At least one individual, YaYa Luis Mendez, has confessed to investigators working on behalf of the [New Jersey attorney general’s] office to having stolen ballots out of mailboxes, both completed and uncompleted, on behalf of and at the direction of the [Alex] Mendez campaign,” according to the complaint prepared by McKoy attorney Scott Salmon.

The attorney for Mendez, who leads in the vote count, isn’t disputing that the election results are unreliable. “This election is a sham, regardless of who are the ultimate victors, and this process has to be reviewed by the courts to address the deficiencies in the planning and execution of the election,” Gregg Paster, the attorney, is quoted as saying in Salmon’s complaint. 

For his part, Paster alleges that the botched election has resulted in problems hurting Mendez’s chance of winning. On June 8, Paster sent a letter asking federal authorities to investigate voter intimidation on behalf of the Paterson’s mayor, Andre Sayegh, and local law enforcement.

Mendez is part of a faction opposing the mayor and hoping to gain control of the City Council and push back against the mayor’s agenda. The ensuing investigations into voting irregularities have resulted in Paterson police officers – including those assigned to the mayor’s private detail, according to Paster – knocking on doors and asking citizens about their votes. The local police department says the cops were assisting the state attorney general investigation into the election, serving as translators for differing Spanish dialects.

“Once you start having city police knocking on doors, investigating voting patterns, you’re treading awfully close to the line of banana republic type of tactics,” Paster told RealClearPolitics. “There’s an intimidation factor – you have a lot of immigrants in Paterson, a lot of people that come from places where if the police show up at your door, a lot of times, you know, nobody ever sees you again. And while we’re not alleging local cops are anything like that, this is where a lot of these people have come from and they’re afraid of the police.”

Salmon admits Paterson’s recent election is “crazy,” but points to unique aspects of living in the town that make mail-in ballot fraud more likely – it’s one of the most densely populated cities in America, with lots of residents living in high-rise buildings that have communal mailboxes that are prime targets for ballot theft.

But as noted in Salmon’s legal complaint, Paterson was just one of 31 municipalities in New Jersey that held vote-by-mail elections on May 12. The average disqualification rate for mail-in ballots in all 31 elections across the state was an alarming 9.6%. (The ballot rejection rate drops to 8.1% if Paterson’s results are excluded.)

New Jersey’s municipal elections aren’t broadly comparable to nationwide elections for a variety of reasons, but the 2016 presidential election resulted in a popular vote total with a differential of just over 2%, with fewer than 80,000 votes in a handful of swing states determining the Electoral College victor. Voting irregularities with mail-in ballots could be much less pronounced than what happened in New Jersey last month and still produce a great deal of uncertainty in a national election.

Salmon is hoping vote-by-mail problems will be resolved in the months before the November election. “In New Jersey, people found out that this is going to be an all-mail-in election only a month before, whereas obviously November is still a ways away and there’s a lot more time to educate voters on how to fill out these ballots and how to return them,” he told RCP. But he concedes that it’s “still a fair point” to look at New Jersey’s elections last month and see cause for concern about the national elections.

Rick Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, acknowledged on the Election Law Blog last month that there’s “genuine absentee ballot fraud scandal going on in Paterson, New Jersey and it is going to get a lot of national attention.” Hasen argues that it’s not cause for concern, however, noting there were only 491 prosecutions related to absentee ballots nationwide between 2000 and 2012.

“The rise in vote by mail should lead to increased vigilance against this sort of activity,” he wrote on May 20. “But the push to expand vote by mail is worth it given the great health benefits of increased voting by mail during a pandemic, the small risk of fraud, and the likelihood that fraud will get caught.”

Despite Hasen’s sanguine attitude, the problems in Paterson have received virtually no national attention so far. Salmon and Paster say they’ve had inquiries from only two national news outlets, and almost all coverage of the problems and fraud allegations in Paterson have been confined to local news outlets.

At the same time, dozens of lawsuits have been filed across the country contesting state requirements used to certify mail-in ballots. “Among the main targets are witness and signature requirements for absentee ballots — such as signing the envelope, or getting a witness or notary to sign it, or making sure the voter’s signature is legible,” notes an NPR report earlier this month.

Those lawsuits seeking to expand vote-by-mail include one brought in Nevada earlier year, which aims to do away with signature verification on mail-in ballots altogether – even though ballot signatures not matching voter records was the reason Paterson disqualified over 2,300 ballots.

Meanwhile, the president continues to be an outspoken opponent of voting by mail. He tweeted on June 22, “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” This and other Trump claims about vote-by-mail problems are frequently contested by the press.

“We’ve literally been expecting Trump to tweet about this for the last two weeks,” says Salmon. “Within the McCoy campaign, there have been ongoing jokes about how long it’s going to take for Trump to find out about Paterson and start tweeting.”

The global coronavirus total topped 10 million late Saturday night in the US as a handful of Asian nations reported their case totals for Sunday morning, finally pushing the total over the top. To be sure, there are likely millions of cases that have gone uncounted. But reaching the eight-figure mark is certainly an important psychological milestone, particularly since daily totals for new cases continue to climb.

Roughly a quarter of these cases have been confirmed in the US, which has seen its case total pass 2.5 million, while US deaths are ~125k. JHU counted 499,342 deaths globally as of 1030ET on Sunday.

As more Republicans turn on President Trump and press him to step up and “lead”, or risk allowing Joe Biden to win the election without leaving the basement, the Atlantic-run (and Laurene Powell Jobs-funded) COVID-19 Tracking Project has made an interesting point.

The number of cases confirmed during the outbreak in the northeast represents only a small portion of the total, while the timing of the outbreak in the south and west means more of the actual case total is being captured.

It’s important to remember that diagnostic testing only captured a small % of the actual infections in the Northeast outbreak.

Though we are setting records for *confirmed cases* — there were almost certainly more total infections at the spring peak than there are right now. pic.twitter.com/fZfu8AqHTf

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

With that in mind, even when it comes to the number of cases being reported daily, the current outbreak probably isn’t as severe as the outbreaks we saw in New York City and the Greater New York area (and surrounding states), even though the daily US national case totals are ~technically~ at fresh all-time highs.

The US saw ~43k new cases reported yesterday, a near-record total and the second straight (some say fourth-straight) day of 40k+ cases.

States reported ~43k new cases today, a near record.
These numbers are a result of increased testing capturing the rapid spread of the virus across a large swath of the country. pic.twitter.com/HeMIiYVMOq

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Another round of rumors about Dr. Fauci being “muzzled” by the White House (despite the fact that he just made another round of interviews) is hitting on Sunday. At this point, the stories are nothing new.

Testing has remained above 500k tests a day, a sign that testing has continued to improve (perhaps more ‘protesters’ are finally taking Gov Cuomo’s advice and getting tested?) despite President Trump’s remarks about trying to slow testing during the early days of the epidemic (there’s no evidence he did, though the sentiment isn’t exactly encouraging).

Our daily update is published. States reported 591k completed tests today.

The nation hadn’t ever hit 500k tests in a day before June, and has now surpassed that number 9 of the past 10 days.

For details, see: https://t.co/PZrmH4bl5Y pic.twitter.com/riLqzU8WPe

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Deaths declined for the fourth day in a row, according to the numbers reported yesterday (which – remember – are reported with a 24-hour delay).

Deaths have continued to fall, even as cases and hospitalizations spike across the South and West.

Here’s what we do and don’t know about the death trends: https://t.co/ZXFERIyS6I pic.twitter.com/MiUJmyD4aN

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Florida reported a record jump in cases yesterday, its second record increase in a row, and at least the third in the past five days.

Florida also reported a record number of cases today—close to 10k.

Florida remains one of the few states that does not report how many people are currently hospitalized. pic.twitter.com/1k6DhZBtew

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Outside of the US, perhaps the biggest news overnight arrives from China, where the Xiongan New Area south of Beijing has been locked down on Saturday, with measures including closing villages, communities and buildings to anyone who doesn’t legally reside in the area, . Hebei province surrounds the federally administered capital city of Beijing. More than half a million people have been placed on a strict lockdown due to this latest outbreak.

Beijing has ramped up coronavirus testing efforts and has tested about one-third of the capital city’s population. It’s believe this outbreak is an extension of the cases stemming from the Xinfadi food market in southwestern Beijing, detected earlier this month.

As of midnight in the US on Sunday, Beijing had run nearly 8 million tests according to, Zhang Qiang, an official from the Beijing municipal committee.

The governor Australia’s second-most-populous state said Sunday that his government is considering targeted stay-at-home orders and locking down suburbs to contain coronavirus clusters in Melbourne. Australia reported 53 new cases on Sunday, 49 of them in Victoria, which raised the country’s total to 7,686 cases and 104 deaths. The latest cluster comes as Australia and neighboring New Zealand had mostly eradicated the virus. Victoria, the state which Melbourne serves as the capital, has reported new cases during 5 of the last 6 days, and was regularly reporting 0 cases a day as recently as June 9. About 40k residents of the state have been tested since Friday.

Iran is also struggling through a rebound in cases, and the hard-hit country is making masks mandatory in public. But the WHO on Sunday declared that the Philippines has seen the fastest increase in COVID-19 cases in the Western Pacific region. According to GMA News Online, between June 16 and 28, the total number of new cases in the Philippines was 9,655; that’s nearly 4x Singapore, which came in second with 2,610 new cases.

Americans hit the streets in huge numbers over the past couple of weeks, calling for an end to systematic racism and radical police reform.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center outlines just who the protestors were. Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that Pew polled 9,654 U.S. adults, of which 6 percent said they attended a protest or rally related to race/racial equality over the past month, a sizeable share given that the U.S. is experiencing a deadly pandemic.

You will find more infographics at Statista

615 of Pew’s respondents attended a such protest or rally and 46 percent of that total were White, 22 percent were Hispanic, 17 percent were Black and 8 percent were Asian.

Pew states that protestors tended to be nonwhite given the total number of adults polled, 64 percent of whom were White, 15 percent of whom were Hispanic, 11 percent who were Black and 5 percent who were Asian. Around 4-in-10 of people who demonstrated were under 30 years of age while older Americans were underrepresented at the protests.

Most participants, 79 percent, leaned towards or identified with the Democratic party.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

An interesting couple of posts from Southfront.org this week gives us some insight as to what’s happening in international oil markets.

Demand for Russian Urals grade oil is so strong that is has been trading at a pretty steep premium to Brent Crude this month. Southfront references this report from Argus research.

This means that the Russian Urals crude is trading at a premium to the European benchmark Brent. The premium is $1.55 per barrel in North-Western Europe and $2.55 – in the Mediterranean.

Argus names competition as the reason of Urals reaching such a high price. After the United States imposed sanctions against Venezuelan oil, American refineries began to willingly buy Russian heavy oil, very similar to the one exported by the Venezuelan PDVSA. In addition, demand for Russian oil in Asia is growing.

Traditionally, Urals trades at a discount to Brent because of a lack of a unified benchmark price for it. The July Shanghai Crude Oil futures contract closed at ¥299 (or $42.30) per barrel this week, putting it at a ~$1.70 premium to Brent Crude.

Russian Urals is far closer to the Medium Sour oil the Shanghai contract represents than the Light Sweet Brent.

At the same time the Saudi Arabian plan to flood the market with oil to gain market share has failed entirely.

Despite record oil exports in April as Saudi Arabia flooded the market with oil, the value of the Kingdom’s crude exports plunged by US$12 billion from April 2019 levels as the lowest oil prices in years hit revenues.

In April, the value of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports plummeted by 65.4%, or US$12 billion (45.3 billion Saudi riyals), severely affecting the value of the total exports of the world’s top oil exporter, data from Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Statistics showed on Thursday.

China was Saudi Arabia’s main trading partner for merchandise trade in April 2020, with Saudi exports to China valued at US$1.9 billion (7.16 billion riyals).

The Saudis flooded the market with oil after the collapse of the previous OPEC+ deal in early March, exporting a record 10.237 million barrels per day (bpd) in April 2020, up from 7.391 million bpd in March, according to data from the Joint Organisations Data Initiative (JODI).

They shipped out 50% more oil and revenues plunged by 65%. They practically gave the stuff away in April. They had to. With the Riyal tied to the dollar they had to undercut Russian oil which trades in freely-floated rubles.

In March and April the ruble spiked to a high of RUB81.66 per dollar and has steadily fallen since then. Today it is still trading around 5% weaker against the U.S. dollar than it was pre-crisis.

That then becomes an even bigger source of profit given that now Urals grade is trading at a premium to Brent Crude while U.S. exports continue to lag behind.

And the Saudis are now still price takers rather than price makers since they immediately had to go back and adhere to production cuts in like with the rest of OPEC+’s agreement.

This dynamic highlights a couple of interesting points:

1. Russia has emerged as a more trusted partner overall than Saudi Arabia in the Eurasian oil market. Europe is willing to pay a premium for Urals because of both reliability and pricing advantages when currency fluctuations are considered.

2. China is willing to be a big buyer of Saudi oil while it eschews U.S. imports in order to gain leverage over Saudi policy. As their biggest customer China will at some point dictate terms rather than be dictated to.

3. Subtle shifts in the supply chain by major importers could also be a leading indicator of political unrest in the Arabian peninsula. The Saudi economy is in shambles and the Southfront report notes significant layoffs at Saudi Aramco.

I’ve been steadfast in my assessment that Russia holds all the cards in the global oil market at this point. This position will only strengthen as long as oil prices stay in this price range.

And don’t think Iran isn’t okay with this pricing regime since it thoroughly undermines the Saudis, which, in turn, exposes Israel’s soft underbelly. Iran is using the turmoil in the U.S. to, effectively, smuggle oil around the world, including to China.

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Believe it or not, people are actually drinking less now that they are quarantined.

What many thought would be an inevitability – people who are forced to stay home would start hitting the bottle more than usual – has actually turned out to be just the opposite. People are certainly buying more booze to stock themselves up at home, but this doesn’t offset the “gaping hole” from restaurants and bars, according to Bloomberg. 

In fact, global alcohol consumption isn’t expected to hit pre-Covid levels until 2024. 

Recall, we wrote in April 2019 that Gen Z would likely ditch alcohol and become the “ultimate” marijuana consuming generation. The business of booze was already dealing with these types of headwinds heading into the pandemic. There is concern in the industry that even post-pandemic, Americans will continue to cut back on their alcohol consumption.

Mark Meek, Chief Executive Officer of IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, said: “The pandemic is set to cause a deeper and more long-lasting after-effect to the global drinks industry than anything we’ve experienced before. In many ways, 2019 was perhaps the last ‘normal’ year for the drinks industry.”

The U.S. craft beer boom that has driven the industry for the last decade has given way to hard seltzers like White Claw. And non-alcoholic beer continues to sell well. Non-alcoholic beer is forecasted to grow by 33% this year despite an overall 3.7% drop in the beer category. This is due to brewers putting more time and focus into N/A drinks that retain the qualities of regular beers. 

Jonathan Bennett, executive vice president for merchandising and supply chain for Total Wine, said: “You can have the amazing taste experience of an IPA, but it just doesn’t have the alcohol in it.”

“If this is going to be the end of alcohol, we’re going to be great at it,” Bennett said about non-alcoholic options and low calorie drinks like hard seltzers. 

Non-alcoholic brewer Athletic Brewing Co. says its sales this year have already passed 2019. CEO Bill Shufelt said: “It’s an acceleration of a movement that was already in place toward healthier lifestyle. Sure, many Americans might have drank heavily early on during shelter-in-place orders, but being hungover at home probably got old pretty fast.”

Many athletes still drink Michelob Ultra, which started the low-carb beer trend back in the early 2000’s. But other entrants into the niche, like WellBeing Brewing, are starting to pitch their drinks as perfect after sports. WellBeing even makes a beer with electrolytes, like those found in Gatorade. 

Jeff Stevens, founder of WellBeing and a recovering alcoholic, said: “I was just out all the time, and there was never anything to drink. None of the choices, even then, were good. And it was like: Why isn’t anyone doing craft beer in this space?”