After Mass Chicken Cull, China Approves Live Poultry From US
The Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) of China has approved the import of live chickens from the US after farmers across the country were ordered to cull tens of millions of chickens because of the Covid-19 outbreak.
The MOA had banned poultry meat imports from the US in 2015 due to avian influenza threats.
As a concession for the phase one trade deal, China had lifted poultry meat import bans and now has allowed the import of live chickens, reported the Financial Times.
Beijing allowing the MOA to approve the import of live chickens is mostly because the mass culling has led to a sharp increase in prices. At the moment, China isn’t just facing a shortage of food, but also an economic crisis, and couple both of those together, the real threat of protests and riots in many cities, some larger than NYC, could be nearing.
“There is no question China’s chicken population will fall sharply in the coming months,” said Qiu Cong of Jinghai Poultry Industry Group. “The chicks are gone and farmers are struggling to make ends meet.”
A report by Wang Zhongqiang, a former director at the China Animal Husbandry Association, and Ning Zhonghua, a professor at China Agricultural University, said farmers had culled upwards of 100 million young chickens since the virus broke out. Though the figure is approximately 1% of China’s annual production of 9.3 billion chickens, it’s currently having an impact on prices.
On top of this all, farmers culled 50% of the country’s pig herd last year on the rapid spread of the African swine fever virus.
Darin Friedrichs, a Shanghai-based commodity analyst at INTL FCStone, said meat prices in China would remain high for the next quarter while new sourcing is seen. Friedrichs added that shortages could persist in the weeks ahead.
Charoen Pokphand Group, a top animal feed maker with factories in Hubei, the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak, said its supplies are running low. “Freight traffic has collapsed in Hubei,” the company said. “There are roadblocks everywhere.”
China allowing imports of live chickens from the US is a positive for the Trump administration but won’t have a significant impact on reaching the $200 billion hard targets of goods the country must purchase over the next two years.
The virus impact for US goods under phase one trade deal has likely plunged. Even Trump administration officials admit the trade deal will be slow to implement considering the disruptions in China.
Virginia Governor’s ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Fails After Democrats Balk
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s bid to ban the sale of so-called assault weapons has failed after Democratic Senators balked at the controversial proposal, according to Fox5.
Then and now: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D)
Those opposed opted to shelve the bill for a year in order for the state crime commission to study the issue – a decision which drew cheers from gun advocates during a highly anticipated committee meeting.
Four moderate Democrats joined Republicans in Monday’s committee vote, rejecting legislation that would have prohibited the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms, including popular AR-15 style rifles, and banned the possession of magazines that hold more than 12 rounds.
The bill was a top priority for Northam, a Democrat who has campaigned heavily for a broad package of gun-control measures. –Fox5
Gun owners and Second Amendment activists accused Northam and others of attempting to confiscate commonly owned guns from law-abiding citizens despite the governor’s repeated assertions that he does not want to confiscate guns. He argued that banning the sales of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines would deter mass murderers.
Tens of thousands of Second Amendment activists flooded the state Capitol in protest of the bill – with many exercising their right to open-carry.
Still, while Northam’s ‘scary looking rifles’ bill has failed, he has been able to push through much of his gun-control agenda.
Earlier proposals to ban possession of AR-15-style rifles or to require owners to register them with state police have been scrapped. The governor had hoped a watered-down would win over enough Democratic moderates for passage.
…
Lawmakers in both the House and Senate have already advanced several other gun-control measures and should finalize passage in the coming days. Those bills include limiting handgun purchases to once a month, universal background checks on gun purchases, allowing localities to ban guns in public buildings, parks and other areas, and a red flag bill that would allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from anyone deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others. –Fox5
In short, if you oppose abortion and want to protect your family, don’t live in Virginia.
“The Situation Is Evolving” – AAPL Cuts Guidance Due To Virus Disruptions
Surprise!
Apple has issued a press released, admitting it does “not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter” due to coronavirus related issues.
In other words, the guidance we issued 19 days ago – blowing off any impact from the virus – is completely worthless.
As the public health response to COVID-19 continues, our thoughts remain with the communities and individuals most deeply affected by the disease, and with those working around the clock to contain its spread and to treat the ill. Apple® is more than doubling our previously announced donation to support this historic public health effort.
Our quarterly guidance issued on January 28, 2020 reflected the best information available at the time as well as our best estimates about the pace of return to work following the end of the extended Chinese New Year holiday on February 10. Work is starting to resume around the country, but we are experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated. As a result, we do not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter due to two main factors.
The first is that worldwide iPhone® supply will be temporarily constrained. While our iPhone manufacturing partner sites are located outside the Hubei province — and while all of these facilities have reopened — they are ramping up more slowly than we had anticipated. The health and well-being of every person who helps make these products possible is our paramount priority, and we are working in close consultation with our suppliers and public health experts as this ramp continues. These iPhone supply shortages will temporarily affect revenues worldwide.
The second is that demand for our products within China has been affected. All of our stores in China and many of our partner stores have been closed. Additionally, stores that are open have been operating at reduced hours and with very low customer traffic. We are gradually reopening our retail stores and will continue to do so as steadily and safely as we can. Our corporate offices and contact centers in China are open, and our online stores have remained open throughout.
Outside of China, customer demand across our product and service categories has been strong to date and in line with our expectations.
The situation is evolving, and we will provide more information during our next earnings call in April. Apple is fundamentally strong, and this disruption to our business is only temporary. Our first priority — now and always — is the health and safety of our employees, supply chain partners, customers and the communities in which we operate. Our profound gratitude is with those on the front lines of confronting this public health emergency.
What is notable is the absence of a “but we’ll increase out share buyback program” rescue package for shareholders to rely on.
Finally we note that the timing of this statement is anything but coincidence – on a market holiday in the US – as it gives the analyst community enough time to script their narrative for why this can all be discounted… or is more than priced in already… and/or will be erased thanks to an imminent v-shaped recovery or some such completely unknowable bullshit.
Of course this is all great news for the stock – consider what happened the last time AAPL cut guidance…
This Is What Hedge Funds Bought And Sold In Q4: Complete 13F Summary
Many years ago, hedge fund 13-F reporting season was a time of excitement for all those who find perverse delight in reverse-engineering what hedge funds owned some 45 days ago (without even having a glimpse of their offsetting short book), as if it would give them the magic key to outperforming the market (it wouldn’t). That excitement faded away about 5 years ago when it became painfully clear that in a time of central planning and activist central banks which would never allow another bear market, and as a result hedge funds failed to outperform the S&P500 (which charges 0 and 0 compared to the 2 and 20 demanded by the “smart money”) every single year of the past decade. It’s also why, with a few notable exceptions (such as Dan Loeb, Warren Buffett and a handful of others), almost nobody cares about 13F filings anymore.
For those who still do, and have yet to grasp that in our day and age only buybacks, ETFs, HFT stop hunts, and central bank balance sheets matter, here is a summary of what the most prominent hedge funds did in the fourth quarter.
First, as noted last week, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway unexpectedly added a position in supermarket operator Kroger, which gained as much as 7.3% in extended trading on Friday. The fund also added Biogen, while trimming its holdings in bank stocks including Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp.
Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, Google owner Alphabet saw hedge funds including Eminence Capital and Soroban Capital trim their holdings in its Class A or Class C shares. Viking Global exited its stake in the company’s Class C shares while trimming its position in the Class A shares. Balyasny exited its position in the Class A shares. Tiger Global added a stake in Alphabet’s Class A shares.
Appaloosa Investment added a position in Intelsat S.A., which has fallen 89% from an October high, while two of the top reported holders, BC Partners Advisorsand Silver Lake Group, trimmed their positions in the satellite operator.
Tiger Global tripled its holdings in Uber Technologies Inc., as Viking Global more than doubled its stake in the company. Balyasny and Eminence both added positions in the company, while Arrowgrass and Lansdowne exited.
Some investors trimmed or exited their stakes in Axalta Coating Systems Ltd.amid the company’s prolonged sales process. Corsair Capital Management sold its shares in the car-paint maker as Jana Partners trimmed its holding in the stock. Soroban added to its stake.
Notably, former hedge fund darling Beyond Meat saw funds including Tiger Global and Eminence sell off their shares in the company. Coatue, on the other hand, added a position in the faux-meat maker.
A quick recap of what the rest did is below, courtesy of Bloomberg:
ADAGE CAPITAL PARTNERS LP
Top new buys: BMY, MMM, JCI, TJX, BIIB, CABA, ETN, XP, ITW, KNX
Top exits: ANAB, ABBV, WM, FGEN, GT, ATUS, DOW, LYB, SWK, W
The ongoing outbreak of coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19, continues to dominate commodity and energy market developments, as illustrated by this week’s pick of charts from S&P Global Platts news editors. Plus, key trends in EU and US electricity markets.
1. COVID-19 stalls Chinese workers’ return to manufacturing centers…
What’s happening? China’s coastal provinces are heavily dependent on migrant labour from other provinces. Every year millions of these migrant workers go home for the Lunar New Year, travelling back to the coastal cities when the holiday ends. They go back to jobs on construction sites, in factories and across the service sector. This year the annual migration has stalled due the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, as shown by data from Chinese technology company Baidu. Movement of people into the coastal province of Guangdong after the lunar new year is way down compared to last year. Guangdong is home to more industrial enterprises than another province, many of them privately owned, small and medium sized, manufacturers reliant on migrant labour. The same trend can be seen in Zhejiang and Jiangsu, two other coastal provinces with a large number of private enterprises.
What’s next? State-owned companies are less reliant on migrant labour. The State Council, China’s government, recently announced that 97% of central government-controlled petroleum and petrochemical companies had resumed work. But supply of oil products is not the issue. Demand is the problem. With so few people travelling after the new year and a lack of workers in the coastal provinces, oil demand from the transport, construction and petrochemical sectors is taking a dive. The government has to balance the drive to get people back to work, and the economy moving, with efforts to contain COVID-19 – no easy task. Look for rising levels of internal migration to indicate that China’s economy is spluttering back to life and that oil demand is back on the rise.
2. …and adds to woes for already weak LNG market
What’s happening? China is the world’s second-largest LNG importer behind Japan. Quarantines and travel restrictions imposed to restrict the spread of COVID-19 have caused a demand contraction, hitting an already oversupplied global LNG market.
What’s next? The impact of the outbreak is expected to worsen in coming weeks as economic activity in key manufacturing hubs struggles to rebound, keeping a lid on natural gas demand and triggering more LNG trade flow disruptions. As the previous item shows, travel restrictions were still preventing millions of industry employees in China from returning to work in the week ending February 14 and factories expected only partial production restarts, with some delaying a return to operations until late February or early March.
3. Slump in Chinese construction and autos hits global steel
What’s happening?Steel hot-rolled coil (HRC) prices in Asian, EU and US markets have been falling as inventories swell. The glut has been sparked by lower demand from China’s construction and automotive industries, where activity has plunged due to measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. US domestic prices have shed 5% over the past month, and Chinese domestic prices almost 10%.
What’s next? With the Chinese, the world’s largest steel producers and exporters, experiencing logistics delays and even docking and unloading restrictions on ships carrying steel into the Philippines and South Korea, exporters elsewhere are eyeing new trade opportunities in China’s usual steel export markets. In flat products, exporters from India, Japan and Russia are seeking new trade, and in long products, Turkish, Middle Eastern and again Russian exporters are keeping a close eye on developments.
4. Successive storms test European wind turbines, power grids
What’s happening? Record wind power generation has its downsides. Storms have swept across Europe the last two weekends, sending UK grid frequency below 49.7 Hertz February 9 and triggering a call for static response from the system operator. When winds are excessive, turbines go into survival mode, automatically reducing or shutting down production. Storm Ciara led to a multi-gigawatt shortfall in UK wind forecasts, even if generation was high at 13 GW – and frequency dropped to 49.6 Hertz. A big slice of this shortfall would have been embedded, distribution-connected capacity, effectively invisible to the transmission system operator. In the event, National Grid dealt with the frequency dive. The lack of inertia on the system, however, is an on-going challenge as dispatchable plants close and more offshore wind farms open.
What’s next? Strong winds are forecast to continue into the current week, with February shaping up to be the third month in a row when European wind generation records are broken. The UK alone is forecast to have close to 15 GW of wind on the system all through Tuesday, equivalent to 50% of demand. There are now over 205 GW of wind capacity installed across Europe, the park averaging 85 GW generation in the most recent week. Average European wind generation this winter stands at around 62 GW, almost 10 GW up on year. Even deficit market Finland has now seen negative hourly prices due to surplus wind spilling from Sweden and Denmark.
5. New England power capacity auction clears at lowest price ever
What’s happening? The New England power market operator’s auction for electricity supplies to be delivered in 2023/24 recently cleared at $2/kW-month, the lowest price since the auction has been conducted. Reductions in expected future power demand and other factors were cited as reasons for the low clearing prices.
What’s next? Next year’s capacity auction will be influenced by a variety of factors on both the supply and demand side, many of which remain uncertain. However, the volume of resources that elect to retire from the market and market design changes being implemented to improve fuel security will impact clearing prices in the next auction. Low capacity prices have been an issue across the US and several proceedings are underway to address problems in these multi-billion dollar markets.
Citing polling data that suggested the former mayor was tracking poorly among 18- to 25-year-old African Americans, Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign hired thousands of canvassers Friday to stop black men on the street and force them to hear his campaign pitch.
“We want to make sure black voters can’t walk down the street without hearing Mike’s message loud and clear,” said campaign spokesperson Julie Wood, clarifying that canvassers have received training on the proper tactics for stopping black men and throwing them onto the ground while delivering Bloomberg’s talking points.
“We’ve also instructed our canvassers to confiscate any materials supporting other candidates. In some cases, we might actually take some men into custody and bring them back to campaign headquarters. This is a massive undertaking that will run well beyond Super Tuesday.
We’ve already set up Bloomberg-branded vans in black neighborhoods across the country to spread our message. It’ll all be worth it once these young black men hear what Bloomberg has to say about funding social security while they’re pressed up against a brick wall with an elbow digging into their backs.”
At press time, Bloomberg defended his campaign’s decision to stop black high schoolers on the street, insisting that they’d be of voting age soon enough.
At least 550,000 cases. Maybe 4.4 million. Or something in between.
Like weather forecasters, researchers who use mathematical equations to project how bad a disease outbreak might become are used to uncertainties and incomplete data, and Covid-19, the disease caused by the new-to-humans coronavirus that began circulating in Wuhan, China, late last year, has those everywhere you look. That can make the mathematical models of outbreaks, with their wide range of forecasts, seem like guesswork gussied up with differential equations; the eightfold difference in projected Covid-19 cases in Wuhan, calculated by a team from the U.S. and Canada, isn’t unusual for the early weeks of an outbreak of a never-before-seen illness.
But infectious-disease models have been approximating reality better and better in recent years, thanks to a better understanding of everything from how germs behave to how much time people spend on buses.
“Year by year there have been improvements in forecasting models and the way they are combined to provide forecasts,” said physicist Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University, a leading infectious-disease modeler.
That’s not to say there’s not room for improvement. The key variables of most models are mostly the same ones epidemiologists have used for decades to predict the course of outbreaks. But with greater computer power now at their disposal, modelers are incorporating more fine-grained data to better reflect the reality of how people live their lives and interact in the modern world — from commuting to work to jetting around the world. These more detailed models can take weeks to spit out their conclusions, but they can better inform public health officials on the likely impact of disease-control measures.
Models are not intended to be scare machines, projecting worst-case possibilities. (Modelers prefer “project” to “predict,” to indicate that the outcomes they describe are predicated on numerous assumptions.) The idea is to calculate numerous what-ifs: What if schools and workplaces closed? What if public transit stopped? What if there were a 90% effective vaccine and half the population received it in a month?
“Our overarching goal is to minimize the spread and burden of infectious disease,” said Sara Del Valle, an applied mathematician and disease modeler at Los Alamos National Laboratory. By calculating the effects of countermeasures such as social isolation, travel bans, vaccination, and using face masks, modelers can “understand what’s going on and inform policymakers,” she said.
For instance, although many face masks are too porous to keep viral particles out (or in), their message of possible contagion here!“keeps people away from you” and reduces disease spread, Del Valle said. “I’m a fan of face masks.”
The clearest sign of the progress in modeling comes from flu forecasts in the U.S. Every year, about two dozen labs try to model the flu season, and have been coming ever closer to accurately forecasting its timing, peak, and short-term intensity. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines which model did the best; for 2018-2019, it was one from Los Alamos.
Los Alamos also nailed the course of the 2003 outbreak of SARS in Toronto, including when it would peak. “And it was spot on in the number of people who would be infected,” said Del Valle: just under 400 in that city, of a global total of about 8,000.
The Covid-19 outbreak in China is quickly spreading worldwide, sparking quick calculations on how deadly this new disease is. One measure is called a case fatality rate. While the formula is simple, it’s difficult to get a precise answer.HYACINTH EMPINADO/STAT
The computers that run disease models grind through calculations that reflect researchers’ best estimates of factors that two Scottish researchers identified a century ago as shaping the course of an outbreak: how many people are susceptible, how many are infectious, and how many are recovered (or dead) and presumably immune.
That sounds simple, but errors in any of those estimates can send a model wildly off course. In the autumn of 2014, modelers at CDC projected that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could reach 550,000 to 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone by late January if nothing changed. As it happened, heroic efforts to isolate patients, trace contacts, and stop unsafe burial practices kept the number of cases to 28,600 (and 11,325 deaths).
To calculate how people move from “susceptible” to “infectious” to “recovered,” modelers write equations that include such factors as the number of secondary infections each infected person typically causes and how long it takes from when one person gets sick to when the people she infects does. “These two numbers define the growth rate of an epidemic,” Vespignani said.
The first number is called the basic reproduction number. Written R0 (“R naught”), it varies by virus; a strain that spreads more easily through the air, as by aerosols rather than heavier droplets released when an infected person sneezes or coughs, has a higher R0. It has been a central focus of infectious disease experts in the current outbreak because a value above 1 portends sustained transmission. When the R0 of Covid-19 was estimated several weeks ago to be above 2, social media exploded with “pandemic is coming!” hysteria.
But while important, worshipping at the shrine of R0 “belies the complexity that two different pathogens can exhibit, even when they have the same R0,” the Canadian-U.S. team argues in a paper posted to the preprint site medRxiv. Said senior author Antoine Allard of Laval University in Quebec, “the relation between R0, the risk of an epidemic, and its potential size becomes less straightforward, and sometimes counterintuitive in more realistic models.”
To make models more realistic, he and his colleagues argue, they should abandon the simplistic assumption that everyone has the same likelihood of getting sick from Covid-19 after coming in contact with someone already infected. For SARS, for instance, that likelihood clearly varied.
“Bodies may react differently to an infection, which in turn can facilitate or inhibit the transmission of the pathogen to others,” Allard said.
“The behavioral component is also very important. Can you afford to stay at home a few days or do you go to work even if you are sick? How many people do you meet every day? Do you live alone? Do you commute by car or public transportation?”
When people’s chances of becoming infected vary, an outbreak is more likely to be eventually contained (by tracing contacts and isolating cases); it might reach a cumulative 550,000 cases in Wuhan, Allard and his colleagues concluded. If everyone has the same chance, as with flu (absent vaccination), the probability of containment is significantly lower and could reach 4.4 million there.
Or as the researchers warn, “the outbreak almost certainly cannot be contained and we must prepare for a pandemic ….”
Modelers are also incorporating the time between when one person becomes ill and someone she infects does. If every case infects two people and that takes two days, then the epidemic doubles every two days. If every case infects two people and they get sick four days after the first, then the epidemic doubles every four days.
This “serial time” is related to how quickly a virus multiplies, and it can have a big effect. For a study published this month in Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers at the University of Toronto created an interactive tool that instantly updates projections based on different values of R0 and serial interval.
Using an R0 of 2.3 and serial interval of seven days, they project 300,000 cases by next week. If the serial interval is even one day less, the number of cases blasts past 1.5 million by then. But if the countermeasures that China introduced in January, including isolating patients, encouraging people to wear face masks, and of course quarantining Wuhan, reduce the effective reproduction number, as has almost certainly happened, those astronomical numbers would plummet: to 100,000 and 350,000 cases, respectively.
Just as public health officials care how long someone can be infected without showing symptoms (so they know how long to monitor people), so do modelers. “When people are exposed but not infected, they tend to travel and can’t be detected,” Vespignani said. “The more realistic you want your model to be, the more you should incorporate” the exposed-but-not-ill population. This “E” has lately become a fourth category in disease models, joining susceptible, infectious, and recovered.
At Los Alamos, Del Valle and her colleagues are using alternatives to the century-old susceptible/infectious/recovered models in hopes of getting a more realistic picture of an outbreak’s likely course. A bedrock assumption of the traditional models is “homogeneous mixing,” Del Valle said, meaning everyone has an equal chance of encountering anyone. That isn’t what happens in the real world, where people are more likely to encounter others of similar income, education, age, and even religion (church pews can get crowded).
“Ideally, you’d break the population into many groups” and estimate the likelihood of each one’s members interacting with each other and with every kind of outsider, Del Valle said.
“Your model would become more accurate.”
Called “agent-based models,” they simulate hypothetical individuals, sometimes tens of millions of them, as they go about their day. That requires knowing things like how many people commute from where to where for work or school, how they travel, where and how often they shop, whether it’s customary to visit the sick, and other key details. Computers then simulate everyone’s movements and interactions, for instance by starting with one infected person leaving home in the morning, chatting with other parents at school drop-off, continuing to work on a bus, standing 2 feet from customers and colleagues, and visiting a pharmacy for her migraine prescription.
The models keep track of people second by second, said Los Alamos computer scientist Geoff Fairchild, “and let you assess the impact of different decisions, like closing schools during flu season.” (Some research shows that can dampen an outbreak.) Although “agent-based models can simulate reality better,” he said, they are less widely used because they require enormous computing power. Even on the Los Alamos supercomputer, a single run of a complicated model can take days or even weeks — not counting the weeks of work modelers spend writing equations to feed the computer.
The Los Alamos researchers are still wrestling with their Covid-19 model, which is showing – incorrectly – the outbreak “exploding quite quickly in China,” Del Valle said. It is overestimating how many susceptible people become infected, probably because it’s not accurately accounting for social isolation and other countermeasures. Those seem to have reduced R0 toward the lower range of 2-to-5 that most modelers are using, she said.
In the current outbreak, researchers are building models not only to peek into the future but also to reality-check the present. Working backwards from confirmed infections in countries other than mainland China, researchers at Imperial College London who advise the World Health Organization estimated that Wuhan had 1,000 to 9,700 symptomatic cases as of Jan. 18. Three days later, all of mainland China had officially reported 440 cases, supporting the concerns of global health officials that China was undercounting.
In a more recent model run, Jonathan Read of England’s University of Lancaster and his colleagues estimated “that only about 1 in 20 infections were being detected” in late January, Read said: There were probably 11,090 to 33,490 infections in Wuhan as of Jan. 22, when China reported 547 cases.
“It highlights how difficult it is to track down and identify this virus,” Read said, especially with residents of quarantined Wuhan being turned away from overwhelmed hospitals and clinics without being tested for the virus. Using a similar approach, modelers led by Dr. Wai-Kit Ming of Jinan University in Guangzhou estimated that through Jan. 31, China probably had 88,000 cases, not the 11,200 reported.
Read’s group is updating its model to estimate the fraction of true cases in February; China’s cumulative cases topped 60,000 on Thursday.
For modelers, a huge undercount can corrupt the data they base their equations on. But even with that disadvantage the Covid-19 models “are doing quite well, despite a lot of complicated dynamics on the ground,” said Los Alamos’s Fairchild. While it’s not clear yet if they’ve nailed the true numbers of cases, they are correctly projecting the outbreak’s basic shape: increasing exponentially, the number of cases growing more quickly the more cases there are.
Cable Sinks To Session Lows As UK Slams “Absurd” EU Trade Rules, Expects “Open & Fair” Competition
The pound sinks to session lows as Boris Johnson’s chief negotiator David Frost said democracy would “snap – dramatically and finally” if Britain is forced to follow European Union law after Brexit, reported The Telegraph.
Britain demands an open and fair competition based on a free trade agreement with the EU, Frost said, adding that EU trade rules are “absurd.”
Sir David Frost public speech in Brussels on Brexit and the new relationship. In a nutshell: #Brexit was a matter of time because Napoleon did not invade the UK.
(He did not say “Napoleon” but take it as shorthand for constitution,civil law,Hegel idealism vs Burke’s utilitarism) pic.twitter.com/wNbKckX1bM
“To think that we might accept EU supervision on so-called level playing field issues simply fails to see the point of what we are doing,” Frost said during a speech at a Brussels university on Monday evening.
Ahead of trade negotiations expected in early March, Frost said freedom to diverge from EU rules and regulations was the “point of the whole project” of Brexit and “central” to Johnson’s idea for the country’s future.
Frost said the “UK would not extend the transition period beyond end-2020.”
“Tying UK to EU rules would undermine public backing for UK government at home,” he said, adding that “EU must endorse the relationship of equals if it wants a sustainable relationship with the UK.”
“We bring to the negotiations not some clever tactical positioning but the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country,” Frost said.
He added:
“It is central to our vision that we must have the ability to set laws that suit us – to claim the right that every other non-EU country in the world has.”
The pound tumbles to session lows after Frost’s speech:
WikiLeaks twitter account has been locked, shortly before Assange extradition hearing. All attempts to get it reopened via regular channels have been unsuccessful. It has been impossible to reach a human at twitter to resolve the issue. Can someone fix this?@twittersupport@jack
It is not the first time Twitter has – allegedly – acted to suppress WikiLeaks voice.
As The Washington Examiner noted as far back at 2016, Twitter lit up in late July with allegations that it tried to suppress news that secret-leaking website Wikileaks exposed thousands of emails obtained from the servers of the Democratic National Committee.
Friday afternoon, users noted, “#DNCLeaks” was trending, with more than 250,000 tweets about it on the platform. By Friday evening, it vanished completely from the site’s “trending” bar for at least 20 minutes. It returned as “#DNCLeak” after users erupted, though it was too late to quell their rage.
#DNCLeaks was trending #1. @twitter pulls it from the list completely, gets called on it, then replaces it with #DNCleak to cover themselves
In a message on Twitter, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in response to the allegation, “False,” though users were quick to express their skepticism. And we are sure it’s just a coincidence that WikiLeaks account has been locked-down again this time.
Jeff Bezos Launches $10 Billion “Bezos Earth Fund” To Fight Climate Change
Just in case Greta Thunberg hadn’t whipped up enough of a frenzy among those who are convinced the world will end in 12 years if central banks don’t print several quadrillion dollars now and immediately fix the weather, while commercial banks are already salivating at the outsized profits generated by crowding their virtue signalling clients into all sorts of ESG portfolios (such as the ESGG ETF whose top holdings are bizarrely Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Intel), moments ago the world’s richest man slammed shut any further debate whether climate change (and ESG) is the next social mania, when he announced (on the wokest of places, i.e., Instagram), that he is committing $10 billion to fight climate change.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce I am launching the Bezos Earth Fund.
Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share. This global initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world. We can save Earth. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals.
I’m committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer. Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let’s protect it, together.
– Jeff
What was left unsaid is that Bezos is moving forward with the implicit understanding that central banks will match his $10 billion check at a rate of roughly 100 to 1, and commit trillions more just so investors are forced to buy ESG ETFS… where Amazon stock (its army of internal combustion engine delivery trucks notwithstanding) always finds itself among the Top 5 holdings, and any further push by the establishment to force more “virtuous ” ESG buying will promptly recover Bezos’ paltry $10BN investment, as AMZN’s market cap promptly doubles to $2 trillion.
Or as Jeff, or frankly everyone else would say, you have to spend $10 billion to be the first to hit $1 trillion.
Incidentally, for all those who are only catching up on the latest social dogma that is climate change and ESG, here are a bunch of primers to get up to speed on all the religious fabulations you will need to make “informed” investment decisions for the next 5-10 years.
